


House of Red Dreaming

by Arazsya



Series: Of Curses and Firelight [1]
Category: Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-19 17:29:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 41,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2396783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><strong>Red</strong><br/><em>adjective</em> - of a colour at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet, as of blood, fire or rubies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set post-Series 4.

Ahead, the road fell away into white. The rain had grown so heavy that Chandler was sure the windows would be covered in scratches by the time that they reached their destination. Its rattle tapped on every surface like restless fingers, the shell of the car dangerously thin between them and the downpour. The windscreen was a deluge, no matter how quickly the wipers struggled, frantic, across it.

Miles kept driving, his jaw like a bulldog’s, stubborn and uncompromising. Every time he changed gear, the vehicle thudded, juddering the bones of the occupants, and no one spoke to cover it. They had nothing to speak about.

Chandler sat in the passenger seat and tried not to think about how this was the longest he had ever heard his DCs go without talking, or about the piece of paper that he hadn’t known what to do with, about the shadow of an old woman in headlamps.

_Team-building_ , Anderson had told him. That meant _you’re broken_. And they were. They had started fracturing almost as soon as he had arrived, so long ago, all ties and frustration. He hadn’t expected to stay for so long. But, with the papers that he hadn’t quite started to fill out, it wouldn’t be much longer.

“Maybe the rain will stop,” Buchan said hopefully, banished to what, with both seats down, would have been the boot, their luggage piled precariously up beside him. It was a desperate attempt to start conversation, and it fell through before it had even reached the back seat proper, muffled by the silence that held court there. DC Riley had placed herself between Kent and Mansell, but seemed unwilling to speak with either of them, staring stubbornly straight ahead while they glared out of a window each, a Whitechapel CID coat of arms.

Chandler’s tongue had grown too used to having nothing to say to etch itself into a reply, and Buchan glanced down, as if accepting that there was nothing that he could do about the quiet.

“Turn left,” the SatNav ordered, and Miles did as he was told.

He hoped the silence was just the shock, or the rain, forcing all other sounds away. That somehow, his DCs had forgiven one another or been brought back together in the face of adversity. But the worst possibility lurked in his brain like a tumour, the idea that they had managed to fracture further and deeper than could ever be repaired.

Something constricted in Kent’s pale throat, and his eyes turned away from the window. Chandler met them, realised that he had been looking back for more than the four seconds acceptable in the wake of Buchan’s comment, and jerked his head back to facing the front.

Ahead, a distant, blurred shape struggled to resolve itself from the rain, distorted in the water until it might have been anything. A gargoyle, clawing its way out of the earth, Chandler thought distractedly, and then tried to find something, _anything_ , else. Its aspect cleared as Miles brought them closer. A tall building, buttressed against the wind, given spines by the rivulets of rain on the glass.

He narrowed his eyes at a sign too covered in moss for him to pick out lettering, trying to read it anyway, but gave in as the wheels of the car scudded a slurry of water up over the window.

“Arriving at destination on left,” the SatNav informed them, then silenced itself with a disappointed-sounding bleep.

Miles turned into what Chandler hoped was a driveway, the car indicator’s flash glancing off the raindrops and struggling back toward home. The engine cut out abruptly, and they sat and stared at the house, the hope that Miles had put the postcode in wrong visible in the creasing on their foreheads.

There was a movement from the side of the building, and a humbug-striped umbrella appeared, bobbing its way toward the car. It stopped at the drivers’ side, a black-gloved hand emerging from beneath to knock.

The window whirred down, though there was barely a crack of fresh air before it whined to a halt. Chandler’s jaw tightened, convinced that it felt the splash of the rain onto his features anyway.

“Detective Inspector Chandler?” demanded the umbrella, voice twisting into a Welsh lilt.

Miles indicated Chandler shortly with a jerk of one hand. “He is. DS Miles. These are DCs Riley, Kent and Mansell, and Mister Buchan.”

“Thornton. Welcome to Tŷ Gors,” the umbrella said blandly. “I’m sure you’re all very glad to see it. It’s what, five hours from Whitechapel?”

“Took us six,” Miles replied, tactfully ignoring the former. “You have any more umbrellas?”

“It’s only water,” the umbrella announced, lifting enough for Chandler to catch a glimpse of the bearer’s impressive chin. “Would you like to come inside?”

There was a moment of hesitation, then Mansell slammed his door open and scrambled ungracefully out. Kent and Riley were gone a moment later, and before their seatbelts had finished sliding away, Miles was ducking under their host’s umbrella.

Chandler made to join them, only for a sudden clattering from the boot to yank his attention back around. Buchan had stood up, shouldering into Riley’s bag, but seemed at a loss as to what else to do.

“Um, Joe, how do I get out?” he called, voice mottled with hesitations.

“There are instructions on the back of the seat in front,” Chandler informed him, turning his collar up and stepping out into the downpour. The first few wet impacts against his head were like miniature slaps, and he cursed his lack of foresight in not bringing an umbrella of his own.

By the time he reached the porch, the rain had soaked through to his skin, and he was convinced that he could feel its brackish taste in his mouth. Blinking the moisture from his eyes, he gave the narrow hallway a cursory glance, and decided that the days could not possibly go quickly enough. The cinderblock of the walls was pockmarked and scratched, and he did his best not to look at the ceiling, where he knew he would see damp and cobwebs.

“Pauline’s just finishing up with dinner,” their host announced, hooking his umbrella onto a peg. For a moment, Chandler considered leaving his coat in the same place, but the dust that billowed into the air in the wake of Thornton’s movement convinced him otherwise.

“I’ll show you to your rooms, and if you like you can change your clothes, then we can eat.” Thornton paused for a moment, as if trying to remember something, then reached a box down from a shelf. “Phones, please.”

“What do you want our phones for?” Mansell demanded, hand going protectively to his pocket and hovering there.

“We find that phones tend to provide an excuse not to acknowledge the existence of other humans.” Their host opened the box with a snarl of hinges, revealing an old Nokia rattling around in the bottom. His voice changed, some of the lightness burning away. “Phones, please.”

Buchan was the first to surrender his, and the others gave theirs up with narrow eyes.

Their host smiled pleasantly, regimented teeth showing. “There’s no signal here, anyway,” he said, his tones returning to their former pleasantness. “If you need to make any personal calls, we have a landline. Ask Pauline if you need it.” With that, he closed the box with a noise that sounded like a full stop, locked it, and returned it to its shelf. “There. No need for you to worry about them going missing.”

“Our bags?” Miles inquired, glancing back outside without enthusiasm.

“Pauline will fetch them,” their host announced. He was older than Chandler had been expecting. Beneath the sagging flesh of his face, his skull moved with the words, slack skin pooling in his eye sockets. “If you would all follow me.”

Thornton approached the stairs like someone whose feet had been replaced by twin wooden clubs, the noise of them ricocheting up into the beams. The steps creaked under his tread, and Chandler eyed them dubiously.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Thornton informed them, without turning.

Miles shook his head and followed, and the others trailed after him. Mansell’s hand still lingered, bereft, over where his phone had been, as if he had envisaged spending the whole time texting with Erica like a technologically savvy turtle-dove.

They crowded onto the first floor landing as Thornton indicated the doors at the end, and then those closer to the stairs. “DS Miles, DC Kent, DI Chandler, Mister Buchan, this is your floor. DC Riley, DC Mansell, follow me, you’re upstairs, I hope neither of you has a problem with heights.”

For a moment, Chandler stood where he had stopped, and then he moved to try the door that Thornton had directed him to. The handle was cold against his skin, and he shivered reflexively, but it turned easily enough, without the protesting squeal that he had half-expected.

The room beyond was, thankfully, clean and ordered. A bed against one wall, a cabinet beside it, and not a whole lot else. Painted off-white, it seemed catalogue-new, almost unfinished. Even the books lining the bottom of the cupboard, had creaseless spines. He almost picked one of them up, but the dripping of the rain from his sleeves convinced him otherwise.

Chandler left his coat over a swallow-tail hook on the back of the bathroom door, finding himself more or less dry underneath, and went to see if the mysterious Pauline needed any help with the bags. They were waiting just outside his room. Frowning, he glanced up and down the landing, but there was no one in sight. Only the others’ luggage, left neatly beside their doors, like his.

He withdrew, carrying his bags inside before he headed back downstairs. The steps whined with the pressure as if they had been riddled with woodworm, but there was no give and, as far as he could see, no holes.

The others were waiting in the dining room, sitting around a table that didn’t look affordable on the budget of a team-building centre, all deep mahogany swirls and immaculately polished gleam. Chandler took a seat next to Miles and glanced suspiciously at the platters of food that were already lined up in the centre of the table.

“This Pauline is more efficient than all the serving staff in all the pubs in Whitechapel,” Buchan announced, as if he were attempting to lighten the mood. No one responded. The smiles that they had sported when it seemed as if they had broken their curse had been shocked away, and Chandler couldn’t imagine that there was potential for any of them to resurface.

Thornton strode into the room before the silence could stretch into a tacky breaking point, and took the seat at the head of the table, gesturing at their plates with a sweeping arm.

“Please,” he said, in a tone of voice that was butler-perfect. “Serve yourselves.”

There was a flurry of movement almost before the words had left his mouth. Chandler hung back, unwilling to compete with the others’ jousting arms and lacking what even a generous person might have called an appetite.

“So, we out doing the thing with the balls and the pipes at dawn, then?” Miles asked, heaping his plate with potatoes.

“Not in this weather,” Thornton replied, delicately selecting a piece of broccoli.

“Building the bridge with three slightly too short planks?” Miles suggested, jerking his head at Chandler. “He’ll be able to do it, he’s done a lot of courses.”

“I’m afraid the closest we get to the conventional team building methods are a couple of trust exercises,” Thornton informed him, knife slicing delicately into a piece of meat, cooked rare. The colour of it brought back a vivid image of Llewellyn’s autopsy room, and Chandler swallowed uncomfortably.

“What _do_ you do, then?” Miles demanded, and his voice could have been lifted straight from the interrogation room tape.

“Have you ever read _The Shining_?”

Buchan’s cutlery hit his plate, the sharp guillotine-clatter cutting the conversation away to silence. His widened eyes glinted like marbles in the scant light.

“I’ve seen the film,” Mansell piped up, and the moment was gone. Thornton’s teeth edged out into his smile.

“We find that the isolation and close quarters build a team better than any number of bridges.” Thornton shrugged widely, light glancing off his cutlery with the movement. “That, or everyone kills each other.”

Chandler did his best to laugh into the silence that followed, hoping that that was the reaction their host had been hoping for.

“Of course, before any of you do decide to commit murder,” Thornton added, brightly. “Please bear in mind that you would die of exposure before reaching the nearest town, while making your escape.”

“Duly noted,” Miles muttered. “Won’t Pauline be joining us?”

“No.” Thornton delivered a shred of meat to his mouth and chewed it. “So, I hear things have been quite exciting in Whitechapel recently – the Ripper, the Krays, monsters in the walls. I’m surprised they didn’t send you here sooner. Do you know who’s doing your job while you’re away?”

“I was assured that it was being taken care of,” Chandler said, though Anderson hadn’t told him who. Whoever they were, they wouldn’t be using the station; someone was finally there to fix the issues with the building.

“Of course, of course.” Thornton peered down toward the other end of the table, where the others were eating in silence, Kent’s fork half-heartedly stabbing a carrot around his plate. “Your colleagues are very quiet.”

“Bad case,” Miles told him shortly.

“Aren’t they all,” Thornton mused, his mouthful evidently gone, though Chandler hadn’t seen him swallow. “All of yours, anyway. Never brought in a man alive, as I understand it.”

Chandler gritted his teeth as the dinner suddenly became as unpleasant as the one he had attended with Anderson during the Ripper case. The others’ cutlery paused, as if everyone were holding their breath.

“We’ve saved lives,” Kent announced, without looking up from his plate, though the carrot was granted a temporary reprieve.

“There are people who are alive at this moment who wouldn’t be were it not for us,” Buchan agreed quickly, brandishing his fork somewhere between making a point and threatening. “For example, the last victim of the New Ripper.”

Chandler wondered for a moment whether or not they were just doing their best to make him feel better. He knew that the trend of bodies had started from the moment he had joined Whitechapel CID. And there was a part of him that, no matter how much he tried to rationalise, refused to believe in any coincidence. The word _curse_ was more acceptable to it.

“I didn’t mean to offend,” Thornton said blandly. “I’m sure that if there were anyone better to do the job, they would have replaced you years ago.”

Somehow, he managed to make the compliment sound like an insult.

No one seemed to want to continue a conversation with him after that, and they ate in silence for a while, Chandler trying to force a slice of cottony Yorkshire pudding down his throat.

“Getting a bit gloomy, isn’t it?” Thornton commented eventually, and stood to light the heavy candlestick in the centre of the table, the flame’s reflection flickering in the brass. “Oh, and speaking of the dark, I must apologise if you hear sounds during the night. The piping’s a bit old and it rattles sometimes. We’ve tried getting the plumber in, but there’s very little incentive for him to come out here when he has plenty of jobs in town. That reminds me, if anyone starts feeling ill, let me know as soon as you can, it takes a while for Doctor Black to drive out here. Better for him to have a wasted journey than for one of you to start coughing up your lungs, and him be too far away.”

At the other end of the table, Riley carefully put her cutlery down.

“Is everything alright with your rooms?” Thornton inquired, as if he didn’t believe that his last glut of information required any digestion. “We do our best with them, but we still get complaints every now and again.”

“Mine is fine,” Buchan volunteered, and there was a vague affirmative murmuring from the rest of the diners.

“Power cuts are likely,” Thornton went on, settling back into his seat and glancing at his hands as if he were trying to remember something. There was a red smudge over the back of his knuckles, and he hastily covered it with his other palm. “There should be candles and matches in your cabinets, and, if you need anything, Pauline and I are in the rooms upstairs.”

“When do we start?” Chandler asked abruptly. For a moment, the sound of his own voice, absent for what felt like the last hour, startled him.

“Oh, we’ve already started,” Thornton informed him, lips twisting with a puppet’s smile. “But you can turn in, if you like. It’s getting late, and I think that’s everything that I needed to tell you.”

He had pushed his chair out almost before the other man had finished speaking. It didn’t matter whether it was an early start or not, he supposed. He couldn’t stand another minute in Thornton’s company.

The stairs were creaking underfoot before he realised that he hadn’t said goodnight to Miles, or to anyone, and that perhaps he should have. Too late now, he decided, as his fingers reached out to close over the warm metal of his door handle.

Inside, he plucked a book from the cabinet without looking and settled on to the end of his bed, the sudden lack of company crushing its silence through his head in a way as overwhelming as an ocean wave. Glancing down, he found _To Kill A Mockingbird_ , and he started to read. Or tried to, anyway. Every few minutes, one of the sentences failed and stuttered out in his brain, a noise like a dripping tap ratcheting along his consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is my first time writing for Whitechapel (or for any fandom, really), and I apologise for all of my failings.


	2. Chapter 2

Kent left not long after Chandler. He needed the silence, so that he could try and freeze all the wordless thoughts in his head down to harmless nothings. Try not to feel the rage building inside his head like steam, and know that the only way to release it was to snap.

He considered knocking on the DI’s door on the way past, but his nails curled into his palm the moment he felt the impulse. As if the sudden quiet was some sort of sedative, his steps turned stumbling, but he kept walking. He wouldn’t know what to say, anyway.

For a moment, he thought he saw his reflection in his door handle. He put his hand out to cover it, before his eyes could etch out the details that he didn’t want to see. The metal seemed to burn against his fingers, and he recoiled, hissing, though on the second touch it was cool again. He shook his head, dismissing it, and pushed inside.

The curtains were drawn across the dark mirroring pane of the window almost before his mind caught up with the fact that he was in the room. He sat on the bed, considering the remainder of his surroundings. It was only when trying not to see his own face that he had realised just how many surfaces were reflective. He stripped off his watch and laid it face-down on the cabinet, only to jolt in shock as his shadow twisted against the wall.

Kent swallowed hard, wondering if he should head back downstairs to join Mansell and Riley in whatever card game they had started. Perhaps the anger, the knowledge of how his hands would feel if he struck with them, would be better than this.

Except, he wasn’t sure if he’d be welcomed. Mansell seemed normal with him, most of the time, but sometimes he thought he felt the man’s eyes on his back. As if they were trying to work out what fresh betrayal he would concoct next time, because as far as Mansell was concerned, he wasn’t so much a friend anymore. Just a strange creature behind a face that was vaguely familiar. A creature who could drive him to suicide and then just leave him there on the edge, leave Riley trying to talk him down on her own.

If he were Mansell, he wouldn’t trust him, either. He tried to tell himself that he had panicked, had never thought that losing Erica would affect Mansell so badly. On the whole, he accepted that, but the doubt still picked on the edge of his mind like a child with a scab. It wasn’t the first time someone had died because of him, after all.

The room was too empty, Kent decided. Nothing to distract. But he didn’t want to be with the others, either. Not when all he found in their company was the slow swell of his rage, and the frantic skittering of his thoughts as they tried to hide from it. As they told him that he shouldn’t be feeling it, because Mansell hadn’t said a word about Erica.

Eating, he had looked at his knife, and a cool, detached part of his brain had quietly informed him that he could probably do a lot of damage with it, if he tried. _I won’t_ , he had thought, and the part of his brain had agreed with him politely. _I know you won’t_ , it had said. _But you could. And maybe you might._

He scrubbed at his eye sockets with one hand and reached for a book with the other, but his fingers couldn’t get a grip on any of them. He moved to crouch beside the shelf, trying to see if something was jammed, and the titles of the novels scudded across his gaze. A frown dug itself deeper into his forehead, and he absently wondered whose macabre library they had been donated from.

Movement. His head jerked around so quickly that it unbalanced him, hands lifting in a desperate bid to protect himself, even as the rest of him scrabbled backwards until his spine crunched into the cabinet, but he would look this time, he would see them, he would be able to identify them because he would burn their features into his memory, he would do better this time, and –

Nothing there. Kent shut his eyes and let his head thud backwards into the cupboard. Flinching away from nothing. But his brain still stung with the sudden, fleeting thought that there had been _something_ , his hands shaking.

Outside, the stairs creaked, and Kent’s spine straightened, vertebrae grating against the edge of the cabinet. _Just Skip_ , he told himself, but he couldn’t help the panicked edge to his movements as he stood, his head swaying as if suddenly exhausted.

The bathroom had a mirror that covered most of one wall, like the one in the interview room. For a second, Kent wanted to shade it and see if there were eyes staring at him from the other side, but the edges of his reflection hazed, and he dropped his gaze to the sink. The white of the basin dragged his awareness toward a faintly septic smell, stinging his nose with the trace memory of hospital.

Someone had left a razor next to the toothpaste. The silver of the blade danced with flickering as, overhead, a moth fluttered frantic into the lightbulb. Kent watched it, entranced, hands wrapping white-knuckled around the cold porcelain of the sink.

_You could_ , he informed himself. _You might. It’s one course of action you might want to consider._

_You will_ , announced his reflection in the mirror, a snaggle-toothed monster with a smile that snarled. Something that could describe the colour of blood in every language that mattered.

Then it was gone, and it was just his face, staring back at him, pallid and with eyes so wide it was a wonder that his soul hadn’t already seeped away.

Feet on the stairs, and he hoped, desperately, that Mansell had decided to play some insane prank on him, that Riley wanted to make sure he wasn’t ill, even that Ed had a ridiculous theory about the house which he wanted to air. Just so that he would hear a knock on the door that he couldn’t open himself. He turned, so that he wouldn’t take so long to answer it that they would leave.

They carried on up. Kent shut the bathroom door behind him, and wondered if there was a way for him to cover the mirror with a towel.

This time, he managed to take a book from the shelf, and he started to read, though the words spat and slurred rather than enter his head, and it took him what felt like hours to reach the end of the first page. Then, he couldn’t remember what it had said, and closed the novel with a sigh. The black and red of the cover drew his eye and crackled in his brain, and he put it back onto the shelf before it could develop into a migraine.

He reached for his phone, to text Erica, or his flatmates, or Mansell, but it wasn’t there. His fingers flopped into the phantom space where it should have been, and he settled back onto the bed, head knocking into a pillow which had missed its calling as a brick.

Kent shut his eyes, and the noises started. Elsewhere in the house, something creaked, and something else, something closer, skittered. It would be like trying to sleep outside in the middle of summer when the grasshoppers were striking out their cacophony. And he could almost taste the edge of the nightmares that waited in his skull.

Voices, at last. Kent sat up straight, recognising Mansell and Riley’s tones, and tried to extract words. The walls were too thick for him to hear most of it, but it sounded as if Mansell were complaining about the lack of a television. Less subdued than they had been in the car, but then, they had all been waiting for the DI to say something, do something, that would indicate that they had been freed from the funerary silence.

They went out of earshot seconds later, but it was still enough normality for him to fill his head with for a little while longer, too distant to bring the rage. He lay back again, trying to get used to the noises of the house before he attempted sleep.

The red of the book cover was still there, buzzing in his ears.


	3. Chapter 3

“I can’t believe he took our _phones_ ,” Mansell said again. The words were as familiar to his mouth as words could get, scratching in his mind like a broken record, repeating every few minutes. Every few minutes, when his hand went unconsciously to his pocket to check for his phone, and found nothing there. Then would come the vague, distracted panic as his body assumed that he had lost it. His eyes would skip down to search, only to be drawn into the contorted faces in the wood of the stairs.

“I can see why he does it,” Riley responded, her voice too reasonable and without any of the outrage that should have been there. She looked too tired to be indignant, her hair still scruffy with the rain and her expression painstakingly smooth, as if trying to ward off the inevitable tension headache. “We _are_ supposed to be talking to one another.”

“Talking to one another, while we’re all shut up in our separate rooms,” Mansell commented dourly. “If they really wanted us to solve things by having no choice but to talk to one another, they should have given us bunk beds. We had bunk beds on school trips.” 

“I suppose you were always on the top bunk.”

Mansell smirked at her in confirmation, and moved on to a more important topic. “You know what else we had on school trips? Electricity. Seriously, I haven’t seen a single socket since we got here. How are we supposed to charge – oh.” He tugged his tie away from his neck in an attempt to cover his slip, though she didn’t seem to have noticed it.

“It’s an old house,” Riley pointed out, wincing as the stairs creaked. Perhaps she already had a headache. He supposed that, with the amount of noise the house made, it wouldn’t be long before they all did.

“Lots of old houses have sockets – and televisions,” Mansell countered, an arsenal of complaints about their accommodation blooming into his brain. “What are we supposed to do without a TV? Even the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in had three channels.”

“I think there are books in all the rooms,” Riley announced, glancing upwards as if she were worried that Thornton would hear their comments and turn them out into the gorse to die of exposure. “You could try reading.”

“I’m not sure that _Romeo and Juliet_ is my sort of thing,” Mansell muttered as they turned onto their floor. The doors of the two unoccupied rooms opposite theirs almost seemed to have faces, the twists and knots in the wood mocking, and he shot them a narrow-eyed glare. “Neither is _King Lear_. What have you got?”

“A few crime novels by people who are either using pseudonyms or were fated to write murder books,” Riley said, pausing outside his door. “I was thinking that it might be Thornton’s idea of a joke. Have you got anything else besides Shakespeare?”

Mansell grimaced, the expression pulling his features in directions he had forgotten that they could go. “ _War and Peace_. Honestly, I’d rather count the chips in the ceiling than start it.”

Riley nodded, looking about as enthused by her options as he was.

“Tell you what,” he suggested, glancing up the stairs to make sure that no one was coming. Thornton had said he was turning in for the night, but there had been no news on whether or not this Pauline he kept mentioning was still up. “There might be something better in one of the other rooms.”

“I’m not sure that the others would be best pleased if you disturbed them,” Riley said, the frown creeping out again. “And, knowing the boss, he’s probably reading his.”

“Not them.” Mansell felt a touch of impatience leak into his tone. He gestured at the closed doors, his tie flopping around his fist with the movement. “ _Them_.”

“They’re probably locked,” Riley informed him, moving on toward her room, though she hesitated as her fingers brushed the doorknob.

“No harm in trying,” he countered, and stepped across to the first one. The handle was warm beneath his hand, like a tepid autumn day, and he almost expected it to slide greasily free of his grip when he turned it. The lock juddered it out of motion, and Mansell moved on.

“Goodnight,” Riley called, and he heard the click as she closed her door behind her.

“Night,” he muttered, distractedly, and went to try the second room, without much hope. The handle just twisted uselessly, like a broken flag in a nuclear winter.

Mansell sighed and headed to his own door, cursing himself for not thinking to bring something other than cards. Another failed game of solitaire and his head would explode. But he didn’t see that there was much of a choice – fifty-two card pickup was more optimistic than the endings of the books in his room.

The planks in his room stuck to the bottoms of his shoes like those in a pub, and he tried to imagine himself in one. Drinks with Erica, the crescendo of the beer-bottle conversation around them forcing their heads closer together. And he wasn’t even going to be able to _text_ her for _days_.

Frustration tightened the tie around his hand, squeezing him from his thoughts, and he threw it into the gaping lip of his bag, face twisting. They needed a murderer they had arrested in court, in prison, not a bloody _team building session_.

It felt as if the walls around his room had muted everyone else away. They were thick, the sort of walls that defended castles, that kept the inmates away from one another in jail. There might not have been bars on the windows, but Mansell was fairly certain that the message was still _you stay here until you’ve made yourselves into a proper team again_. And that might take some time.

Perhaps, he mused as he changed for bed, there would be another murder in Whitechapel, and the top brass would call them back because no one else wanted to deal with homicide in a place whose name had been made famous by the serial killer that no one could catch.

Mansell turned out the light, and the sudden darkness fizzed as the bulb took to rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should be uploading the next chapter next Sunday, but it is NaNoWriMo this month and I am doing it, so I apologise in advance if what passes for regular uploading goes completely out the window. Also, thanks for the kudos! ^.^


	4. Chapter 4

By morning, the downpour had dwindled into a frantic drizzle that drove itself into the window in sharp, staccato beats, like insects on a motorway. Miles lay waiting for the day to brighten enough to indicate that it was time to get up, but it remained a muggy grey. Eventually, he thought he heard Buchan moving in the next room, and took that as his own personal alarm.

He had expected Thornton to come along knocking on their doors to wake them, but he heard no movement on the stairs, though he listened from the moment that he woke up. There was still nothing when he staggered blearily into a shower that spat water down at him like chips of warm hail, and couldn’t hear anything but the whining of the pipes.

Chandler was already sitting at the dining table by the time Miles got there, neat as ever and reading through the previous day’s paper, though the acrid scent of Tiger Balm betrayed the façade.

“Morning,” Miles offered, taking the seat next to his boss and eyeing the lack of plates on the table. Their absence sat wrong with him, considering how well everything had been prepared the previous day. “You know what time breakfast is?”

“I’ve not seen Thornton this morning,” Chandler replied, without looking up, though it was difficult to see what was so riveting about yesterday’s news. They had heard some of it in the car, until the signal had cut out into a helpless gurgle of static. “And it doesn’t sound like there’s anyone in the kitchen.”

“Late risers, then,” Miles commented, checking his watch to make sure that it was still nine o’clock. “For a team building retreat, anyway. Would have thought they’d be waking us up at five thirty in the morning.”

Chandler said nothing in reply, and Buchan was there before Miles could try to prompt anything. The historian filled the room with noise even though he hadn’t said anything, peering around as if searching for something.

“Where did you get the paper?” Buchan asked eventually, as if he couldn’t function before he had had his daily dose of intellectual stimulation, and Chandler glanced up.

“It was on the table when I got here,” he said. “Someone’s already done most of the crossword. Incorrectly, I’m afraid.”

“Sudoku?” Buchan inquired, hopefully, and Chandler shook his head. The historian deflated, crestfallen, and Miles _almost_ felt sorry for him as he took a forlorn seat at the table, staring at the surface as if it had one of his precious files on it.

The minutes ticked past, and the only movement on the stairs was Kent, Riley and Mansell heading down, their faces as dour as the day outside the windows. Thornton remained as absent as if they had all somehow managed to imagine him.

“No one’s found a note, or anything, have they?” Miles checked, glancing around to include all of them in the question.

Chandler shook his head, turning to the last page of the paper with a faint drifting of newsprint. Buchan shrugged, his attention fixed on the document as if he were a vulture waiting for an animal to die.

“What about you lot?” Miles prompted his DCs. “Any of you heard anything from Thornton?” 

“He’s not up yet?” Riley blinked in surprise, checking her watch. Confusion deepened the frown which fatigue had left on her features.

“I’ll go and knock on his door,” Mansell announced, and Miles watched him turn around, wondering what it was he wanted to complain about so much that he had created extra work for himself. Probably just wanted his phone back.

“Do you think we’re meant to make ourselves breakfast?” Buchan pondered, only to snatch away the paper almost before Chandler had finished setting it down. He produced a pen, seemingly from nowhere, and buried himself in the half-finished crossword, ignoring the silence that followed his question.

Mansell was back before anyone answered, as if he had run the distance, irritated hands curling into fists at his sides.

“There’s no one there,” he reported, voice sallow. “No one answered the doors, and they were locked when I tried them.”

For a moment, Miles considered fetching the car keys from his room and just driving back to Whitechapel. Back to Judy and the kids, and the ghosts lurking in the recesses of the station.

Perhaps Thornton had had a similar idea, he thought, standing and moving to the window. He leant as close to the pane as he could without his breath fogging the image, and peered out into the damp.

“Anyone remember if they had a car parked out there?”

Riley moved to join him, her reflection as hollow-eyed as if sleep had been burrowing there in a failed attempt to make it into her head.

“I don’t know about them,” she said, fingers moving to pick over the edge of her plaster. “But we certainly did.”

“What do you mean?” Chandler demanded, head lifting, showing more interest in this than he had in anything since they had lost their last murderers. Mansell jostled at Riley, trying to see out of the window, and she swatted his arm.

“Our car’s gone,” Miles confirmed, struggling to see deeper into the grey beyond the pane, as if that would show him that he was wrong, that it was parked just out of sight and that nothing was awry.

“Stealing patrons’ cars can’t be a part of standard operating procedure here, can it?” Buchan’s voice had a nervous twist to it, and Miles’ head crackled with resentment in response. “Joe?”

“Thornton did say that they weren’t conventional,” Kent offered, reported speech with no self or opinion behind it.

“Maybe they just moved it somewhere more out of the rain,” Mansell suggested. “No one’s actually going to steal a car from a house full of police detectives.”

_They would have to have taken the keys from my room_ , Miles realised, but Chandler was talking before he could air the thought, sounding irritatingly and unflappably calm. As if all of his negative emotions had been shredded out of him, a torrent of red, in the past few days.

“We should wait for them to come back,” their DI informed them. “If they don’t, we can find the landline and use it to call someone. In the meantime, I’m sure we could all do with breakfast.”

He said nothing about who was going to make this breakfast that no one was going to feel like eating. Eventually, they all ended up picking at the tasteless cereal that Mansell found in one of the kitchen cupboards, like a roomful of sparrows. Miles did his best not to let the others see his eyes keep straying back to his watch, and he tried not to be aware of them doing the same.

“How long do you reckon they’ll be?” Mansell asked finally, trepidation stalking around the edges of his features.

“Thornton said it was a long way to the nearest town,” Kent pointed out, but his voice was uneasy, and he seemed to be drowning his spoon in milk rather than actually eating with it.

“He’s trapped us here,” Buchan declared, wild eyes staring at the table in front of him as if it were made of knives. “The landline probably doesn’t even exist.”

“Shut up,” Mansell snapped indelicately, but there was something wrong in his face; he had already had the same idea as the historian. Miles supposed that they all had. Worst case scenarios weren’t exactly difficult to think of any longer.

“If we need to, we can break open that box to get at our phones,” Riley said. She sounded reasonable, but the edges of the plaster on her hand were ragged, the legacy of her anxious fussing at it.

Miles glanced down before he could pick out any more signs of how frayed the people in his team had become. For a moment, he wanted to go and check, go and make sure that the box was still there, but he didn’t. If he didn’t, it would be impossible to find it gone.

The silence came back, and trapped them in the room just as the locks trapped them in the house. None of them could leave while their ears strained to hear the sound of tyres slogging through the wet, lest the cacophony their feet on the floorboards drown it out.

Waiting became unbearable before the hour was out. Thornton and Pauline weren’t coming back. Miles knew that the way that people knew the doorbell would ring the instant before it did, knew who was on the other end of the phone before they answered.

“I promised my husband I’d call,” Riley said finally, hushed, as if it hadn’t been something she had wanted to share with the room, just a memory that had risen slowly to the surface and bubbled from her mouth. “He’ll worry.”

“I’ll help you look for the landline,” Buchan offered immediately, speech spiked and intimidated.

“Try not to break anything,” Miles ordered, more at the historian than at Riley, though she was the one who smiled her acknowledgement at him.

They left without saying anything further, and for a moment, with the grey crowding at the windows and the shadows huddling in the hall, Miles believed that there was no other place in existence. Just this room, with its six small occupants, four now that Riley and Buchan had stepped out into a harsh, hungry nothingness and let it swallow them whole.

Then he heard their feet on the stair, and the instant was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, good news! Or bad news, depending upon whether or not you actually like this fic. But, since this is the fourth chapter, I reckon I'm relatively safe to say it's good news. While I was procrastinating the other day, I worked out how long it would take for this fic to be up in its entirety if I continued uploading only once a week (and it's quite a long time). So despite the fact that I am currently six thousand words behind on my NaNo, writing the sequel to this fic and plotting the sequel to that, I'm going to attempt to update three times per week. So, the next chapter should be up at some stage on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone for reading! ^.^


	5. Chapter 5

The house had eyes. Buchan saw them every time his own lost focus, glaring out of the table, the stairs, the windows. Struggling to sleep the night before, the whorls on his ceiling had taken on the aspect of Oliver Diggory’s face, and he had stared back at it until dawn had granted him his freedom. In daylight, it was possible to believe that it wasn’t about to move.

He had hoped that their all becoming veritable prisoners might have distracted him enough that he wouldn’t feel the walls watching him, a small positive to take away. It had only made the feeling worse, the letters on the crossword he had tried to finish blotting against his eyes, rather than registering into anything that made sense.

“Where do you think we should start?”

Buchan started at Riley’s question, and cursed himself for that. He was supposed to be better, he _had_ been feeling better. Not afraid anymore. But then they had been sent out here, sent out here to step into the maw of the house. Never again to walk anywhere but past its teeth, deeper down its throat.

“The landline,” Riley clarified, turning her head to glance at him, concern making ponderous progress across her face. “You all right, Ed?”

“I’m fine,” he declared instantly, moving on from his own welfare as quickly as he could. Before she could spot the lie. “The landline – well, Mansell didn’t find it in the kitchen, and there’s no sign of it in the dining room, so...”

Riley kept watching him, as if his hastily prepared answer had gone about as deep into her mind as the crossword had gone into his.

“I’m fine,” he repeated, gaze dropping. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

“Me neither,” she offered. She turned away from him, as if accepting that there would be no further conversation on that front. Buchan half-regretted that. He couldn’t articulate it, but he wanted – _needed_ – her help. “I would have thought they would keep the phone in the hall…”

There was no phone in the hall. There was _nothing_ in the hall, except a few empty pegs for coats, and a carpet to provide a forest for the spiders that lurked around the skirting board. No phone and no table to house it, just a flat emptiness from door until stairs.

“There’s not going to be a landline, is there?” Buchan asked her, because there was no point in trying to rid his mind of the fear that had lodged itself there like a monumental tick. Not if it was going to be proven well-founded.

“We just need to keep looking,” Riley said, her voice as upbeat as an acrophobic trying to pretend that they weren’t standing on the edge of a cliff. She glanced into the utility room, but saw nothing worthy of either mention or further inspection. “Try upstairs.”

Buchan didn’t see much point in that. There was no phone in his room, and he was sure that the others would have mentioned it if they had found one in theirs. But he did as she said anyway, the wail of wood resulting from his feet hitting the stairs ratcheting painfully against his skull.

“Maybe in Thornton or Pauline’s rooms,” he suggested, though precious little good it would do them there, when Mansell had already found those doors locked.

Riley didn’t reply, and her footsteps didn’t follow him upwards. Buchan glanced back down into the hall, and saw her motionless shape staring at the shelf which should have held the box of phones.

Buchan went to join her, the dread coalescing into his mind and convincing him that he felt the stairs give under his weight. The idea fired a panic through his synapses that wasn’t gone by the time he reached her.

Where the box had been, there was nothing but a rectangle of dust-free surface, the gleam of the polished wood a mockery of chestnut brown.

“No,” Riley said quietly, her fingers rubbing at her plaster. “There’s not going to be a landline.”

Having it confirmed was somehow even worse than just knowing that he was right. The few meagre bites of cereal that he had managed to swallow started to twist in his stomach, as if they had been made of magnesium.

“We should tell the others,” Riley informed him, in much the same way as a person talks to a soft toy. He supposed that he had about the same potential for speech for the next few minutes.

As she turned back into the dining room, he trailed after her all the same. There was nowhere else to go.

It looked as if nothing had been said in their absence. Mansell was absently shuffling a deck of cards, but he didn’t look as if he were about to decide on a game. The others were sitting in their various separate states of silence.

“There’s no landline that we can find,” Riley announced. She paused afterwards, though what for, Buchan wasn’t sure. None of her audience were displaying any signs of shock, though Miles’ jaw had tightened, his eyes on Buchan as if the historian had personally taken the phone and thrown it from the highest window in the house.

“The box of our mobiles is gone, too,” he added, and now there was a reaction. Mansell’s hands stuttered, the black joker twisting from the pack and landing face-down on the carpet. There was a murmur of curse words, fading into a more empty silence.

“What do we do?”

Buchan was so keen to hear the answer that he wasn’t quite sure who had asked the question. He glanced, like the rest of the team, toward Chandler, and toward Miles, as if hoping that their superior officers had some insight that they had missed.

“I don’t think there’s anything much that we _can_ do,” Chandler pointed out, though his sergeant’s stance shifted, as if he would have preferred they do fruitless press-ups on the floor. Just so that they would be doing _something_. “They’ve taken the car, and they’ve taken our phones.”

“We should leave,” Mansell muttered, reaching down to collect the joker, as if that would hide who had spoken. “There’ll be a phone in the next town.”

“Not in this weather,” Riley reminded him, settling into the chair alongside far more calmly than she should have been able to. Perhaps having children made one experienced in the art of hiding one’s own distress. “Unless anyone’s particularly keen on the idea of pneumonia.”

“There’s no reason to take any drastic action,” Chandler pointed out, though Buchan was fairly certain that Miles, sitting the closest to him, would be able to smell the Tiger Balm that the inspector had been applying. “As far as we know, this might just be part of their team building exercise.”

“Bloody odd if it is,” Miles muttered, but Buchan chose to ignore his remark in favour of chasing after the hope which Chandler’s statement had offered, a moth in a firestorm of negativity.

No one spoke on the subject again, as if they were afraid that if they examined the inspector’s idea too closely, they might begin to find flaws. Cracks, which would be showing deeper on their faces before the day was any older.

“Deal them out, then,” Riley prompted Mansell, shoving at him with her elbow. He did as he was told, automatically dividing the deck between the DCs, though Kent had been so still that Buchan suspected that if someone nudged him, he would fall sideways, revealing himself to be nothing but a life-size puppet, his eyes glass. The others didn’t look much better. And Buchan suspected that any mirrored surface would show that he was among the worst of them.

The silence came back, haunting them, brushing aside the soft shifting of the playing cards, and Buchan could feel them all drowning in it, unable to keep their heads above water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, as ever, for your support. ^.^ I should be uploading the next chapter on Friday.


	6. Chapter 6

There were too many knives. _Not enough forks_ , Riley corrected herself, but where her eyes glanced into the cutlery drawer, they stayed on the cluster of glinting silver blades. The tapering delicacy of their points only served to direct her gaze toward the sharper ones lurking at the back. Her tired mind watched the play of the light against their edges, fascinated by the keen slices of dazzling that scratched against her aching head. They were beautiful. Their possibilities, everything that she had seen in her career as a detective, were odd, abstract things, as distant as a house fire from a lit match.

Too many knives. They overflowed their designated section, one of them slipping over to invade the realm of the spoons. So many that they couldn’t possibly all have been used for eating.

“Riley!”

Miles’ shout brought her up like a gunshot. She grabbed at the potato peelers, turned in time to nearly crash into Mansell as he worried over the mince, and swore. They ought to recommend cookery as an activity for other centres, in that they were now all more likely to strangle one another than they had been all day. That seemed to be what team building was all about.

She thrust one of the peelers at Kent, and he took it quietly. So quietly that she almost expected him to look at it as if he had never seen one before. Instead, he started on a potato, working quickly. The skin sheared away easily, and Riley bit at her own tongue, reminded suddenly of Llewellyn’s autopsy room.

“Keep stirring!”

Miles had taken the duty of overseer, and seemed even more short-tempered than usual. The first few times that he had snapped, she had flinched with the shock of it. No more, her ears dulled to his ire, as long as Mansell was its target.

“It’ll stick,” the sergeant added by way of explanation, his words spat thorns, as he moved closer to the hob. “Have you never made a shepherd’s pie before?”

Riley glanced over at Kent, a laugh ready in her throat, but he didn’t even glance around, dragging the peeler across his third potato, and she let it dissipate.

It wasn’t the sort of thing that she wanted to smile about on her own.

“Are you all right, Emerson?” she found herself asking quietly, letting the conversation between Miles and Mansell fade into background noise. Then, she wished that she hadn’t, because it was fairly obvious that there was something wrong with him. Her head was too full of the absence of her sleeping for her to know what to say about his problems.

He nodded, and she hated how grateful she was when he didn’t go into any more depth.

“You?”

“Looking forward to getting home.” And unless she said something else, the conversation was going to go down like the R101. “I never thought I’d miss the weather in Whitechapel.”

It was clear from his lack of an answer that he wanted to be having this conversation about as much as she did. Or perhaps he just didn’t see any need for him to say anything.

“Have you two finished with those potatoes yet?” Miles’ voice had the cadence of the jaws of a bear trap closing. The words were more like those of an art teacher who believed that somehow talking and drawing could not occur simultaneously.

Kent flinched at the sudden intrusion behind them, his potato peeler swerving dangerously close to his thumb. Riley watched for a second, wondering if there would be blood, but he controlled himself, a swallow twisting under the skin of his throat.

“Nearly, Skip,” he said without looking up, as if the vegetable held as much allure for him as the knives had done for her. Miles’ silence felt pointed, and Riley did her best to ignore a rush of heat through her temples.

Mansell managed to do something else wrong before she could snap at him, yelping at an angry spitting sound from the hob. Miles turned on his heel and marched away, grumbling about how his kids were better at cooking a meal than his detectives, and they needed parental supervision to use the oven.

The next potato found its way into the sink with rather more force than necessary. The water splashed up over Riley’s sleeve, slapping against the plaster, and she gritted her teeth. Reached for the towel, only to find that it had been moved from its hook. It seemed to end up in a different place every time someone used it, and each time, the irritation inside Riley’s head swelled a little more.

Mansell, seeing her predicament, pulled it off the front of the oven and offered it to her. She pulled it from his grasp with a noise that might once have encountered a _thanks_. She doubted it. The only thing that she could think of which would warrant real thanks would be the offer of a lift back to Whitechapel, back to her husband and her kids and her life.

Her family. In an ideal world, she supposed, she should have considered her colleagues a family too. And at times, she had. Not now. Now, all she saw were the spaces inserted between them, only ever breached by the teeth in their words and the fists that they used for striking at one another. The spaces which made her miss her home more, until she could hardly breathe for being away. Perhaps, on the other side of all that distance, they would be feeling the same for her. Her kids were upset enough when she worked a long shift. God only knew how her husband was going to console them when she couldn’t even give them a _phone call._

When she looked around, saw Buchan or Mansell or Kent or Miles or Chandler, what she found herself really seeing was the absence of family, as if the detectives had stolen away her children in the night and then tried to move into their spaces.

It felt like every time she looked at them, she hated them a little for who they weren’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the next chapter should be up on Sunday. Thanks for reading. ^.^


	7. Chapter 7

It was impossible to tell if the face in the knife was distorted because of the metal’s shape, or if it was something else. Kent did his best to hide it inside the food anyway. Food with flavours far too violent for his stomach, that set it roiling in a way that he doubted was just the effect of Mansell’s cooking. But every now and then his eyes would snag on their own reflection and watch it with the same fascinated horror that an arachnophobe would a spider.

What conversation there was glanced off him without impact, a stream parting around a rock. He should have been able to listen, but the words were nothing but sounds twisting between one another. All he could really hear were the distant creakings in the floor over their heads, as if above them something was shuffling. The occasional dull thud like a match being struck.

_Houses make noises_ , he told himself, when his mind dragged enough awareness together to form words in his thoughts. But so, of course, did things within houses, and no amount of believing the former would keep away the shadows beyond their table if they chose to come closer.

Kent shovelled another forkful of shepherd’s pie into his mouth and chewed unenthusiastically, his throat struggling to close.

The conversation ceased, and he looked up enough to establish that they weren’t all waiting for him to say something. Chandler was at the meeting point of the others’ stares, and the ripple of his words managed to reach up over the rock of unawareness that was Kent’s consciousness.

“Panicking isn’t going to do us any good,” he said, though it didn’t seem as if any of them were doing so. Panic had died in the first few hours of their imprisonment, and its corpse had been eaten by the slow crawling weight of dread. “We’ve got plenty of food, and if the weather clears before Thornton comes back, we might be able to make it to the next town.”

The same conversations. Over and over and over and over and over and over again. As if repeating this particular experiment would eventually provide them with a different result. Or perhaps it was something else, like painting over the rotting timbers of a house to try and give it an intact façade. An attempt to reassure themselves that there was a way out.

It might be better if the house _were_ rotting, Kent thought, hunching his shoulders away from the walls. His aunt would have said it was a place touched by bad spirits, and the way that their faces ached with the lack of their smiles, in that moment he would have been inclined to agree with her. Every expression other than frowning had been shredded away. They had been miserable before they had arrived, of course they had, but not like this. Like this, where Mansell hadn’t said anything irritating in over a day and the skipper was behaving like a dog in the early stages of rabies.

Like this, where every now and then, his spine straightened with the same feeling that he had had just before the incident room had been burgled.

The rest of their conversation passed him by as if he had never been able to hear it, and Mansell was the first to leave the table. Going to look for their phones, he said, and though his tone was flat, Kent could see the frantic edge beneath it in the way he tried to walk too slowly from the room.

He found himself standing up not long after, on a search for a quiet that he’d regret once he found it, and no one stopped him from leaving. The noise of the stairs shattered its way into his brain and lodged there. It sounded as if the steps were breaking away behind him, leaving him with no way back.

His door opened with a momentary flash of light that made him scrunch his eyes shut. By the time he could open them again, he was inside.

The room had been filled with mirrors. Mirrors of all shapes and sizes, on the walls, the ceiling, the door, _everywhere_. The brightness of it all dug into his eyes like an icepick, but it wasn’t enough to obscure the fact that his reflection had stepped into the room with him, rictus-snarling, the lines of the skull far too obvious beneath the flesh.

Kent took a step backwards, but the door had closed behind him, and it seemed that the reflections had moved closer, all those smiles carving deeper. Waiting for his face to match theirs.

His hand snatched for the door handle, but slipped off it, unable to get a grip. He wanted to turn his head, guide his fingers with his eyes, but he couldn’t look away from his faces in the mirrors. His head whipped from side to side as if something were about to rush at him from the dark, trying to keep all of them in view. The blood in his throat pulsed so violently that he could almost hear it, see it, his vision thudding.

Across the room, a full-length mirror had him in red up to his elbows, dripping from his nails like a knife-edge, and he redoubled his efforts, though his frantic fingers could no longer find the doorknob.

_It’s not me_ , he told himself, thoughts so spiked with panic that conviction fell straight off them. It was a mirror, they were all mirrors, so how could it _not_ be him? It had his eyes, his hands, had the scratch on the side of his head where Mansell had hit him, had all of it. And it was exactly what Morgan Lamb had said he was. Because she had been right, had been right about all of it, what had happened with Mansell _proved_ it. All the mirrors did was show him who he was, who he had always been.

The door finally gave in to his struggles, crashing into his shoulders as he wrenched it inward, and Kent fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, thanks for reading a chapter which has more overs than the Ashes. If you did. If you didn't, I don't know what you're doing down here. But thanks very much for the support. ^.^ The next chapter might be up on Tuesday, lectures are happening again next week so I don't know if there'll be time, I don't see why there wouldn't be, but well. It will be up on Tuesday, or it won't be.


	8. Chapter 8

The morning shadows were indistinct across the table, their darkness without an edge. Chandler, the first downstairs again, did his best not to watch them, to see if the sun rose and made them shift. There had been too much waiting for things to happen, things that never would happen. And with every expecting second that passed, their own lack of choices forced them to see how helpless they were.

There was no paper to examine, this time, the stories from the last one almost lodged verbatim in his head. Instead, he gazed at his tea as it twisted in the wake of his spoon, the dull whirling hypnotising troubling thoughts away to silence.

When the noise of the stairs came, it was almost deafening. Chandler started, his drink slapping against the side of the mug, dangerously close to the rim. Despite the tired ache dissolving his skull at the eye sockets, he did his best to glance up, to look as a detective inspector should. He didn’t want any of them to see the cracks that they probably already knew were there.

Only Miles, moving slowly, looking down. He seemed just as exhausted as Chandler felt, but neither of them would mention it. Miles wouldn’t say that his boss looked like something a dog had fished out of a canal if the description was something that Chandler could turn right back on him.

“Morning,” he said.

Miles grunted in response, and walked into the kitchen without expanding on it. The next noise was the cupboard doors opening and closing, and Chandler tuned it out, turning his attention back to his tea.

When he looked up again, Mansell and Riley were there, sitting in mutual silence over twin bowls of cereal, and, in the kitchen, someone was clattering loudly about. Miles had returned, curling his lip in disdain over his slice of toast as if it had said something to offend him.

“Has there been any sign of Thornton today?”

The voice came from the doorway, where Buchan was standing, a mug clutched in one hand and a hopeful expression smoothing his features. He was responsible for the previous racket, then. It wasn’t really surprising.

Chandler shook his head, unwilling to dredge up enough mind to speak and have to pretend that it wasn’t a problem. The historian’s face fell, and he vanished back into the kitchen. Chandler glanced down again, only to realise that he had completely run out of tea. 

“Soon, we’ll be overdue,” Riley offered, as if she couldn’t stand to sit through the silence any longer. “They’ll try to get in contact with us here. My husband’s probably worrying already. I told him I’d phone.”

“Maybe they’ll send someone out,” Mansell muttered, his head lifting as he warmed to the idea. It was a welcoming thought against the backdrop of the dour Welsh weather.

“Speaking of being overdue,” Miles growled, giving his watch a pointed glare which made the toast seem lucky to have got off with so little. “Where’s Kent?”

Riley’s eyes turned the question to Mansell, meeting his gaze as he did exactly the same to her. They watched one another for a moment, as if silently arguing over whose responsibility Kent had been, before Mansell shrugged.

“We assumed he’d already be here,” he said, glancing up at the ceiling as if his stare would wake the other DC.

“We didn’t see him on our way down,” Riley added, somewhat gratuitously. 

Chandler considered the information as logically as he could, doing his best to ignore the shrivelling feeling beneath his sternum. He hadn’t heard anything from the room next to his, but then, he didn’t think he had at any stage. The only thing he _had_ heard were people on the stairs.

“Maybe he overslept,” Buchan suggested, appearing in the doorway again after apparently having listened in on most of the conversation. “None of us are sleeping well.”

“I’ll go and knock on his door,” Riley said, her body hunching over as she half-stood, still trying to wolf down a few more spoonfuls of cereal.

“No,” Chandler interrupted, standing. Better that he went, the only one not in the middle of a meal. He doubted he would have been able to stomach one had he tried. “I’ll go.”

He did his best not to see the significant glance that his DCs exchanged on his way past.

The groaning of the stairs was almost physically painful, and he grimaced, wondering how it was possible that Kent had managed to sleep through all of them climbing down. A few short strides to the right door, and he rapped his knuckles against it. It swung inward under the impact, silent against its hinges.

“Kent?” he called hesitantly, unwilling to push it any further.

There was no answer. Chandler counted to thirty before he knocked again, the quiet stiffening his spine. 

“Kent?”

Still nothing, and he took that as an invitation to open the door completely, the movement slow to stop it becoming frantic. Slow, because he was hoping for something to stop him in his tracks, every second stretching with a need for an answer that never came.

The bed was made, almost as neatly as if it had never been slept in. Kent’s bags were lying at the end of it, barely disturbed, and there was still no sign of their owner, the room nothing but a useless, sweeping emptiness.

“ _DC Kent_ ,” Chandler tried, raising his voice a little and hating the way the strain showed through. He gave his surroundings another cursory glance, but there was nothing to indicate any sort of incident.

He made his way back out into the hall, but there was nothing there except the turnings to more places where Kent wouldn’t be.

He descended, and the eyes of his colleagues all turned hopefully towards his entrance, before scudding back down toward the ground at the sight of his expression.

“He’s not there,” Chandler informed them, his voice kept carefully flat. This news, on top of everything else, could cause them to panic properly, losing what little fragile cohesion remained between them.

The silence that followed his words told him that he had a few minutes of shock to work with before fear could get its claws in properly.

“What do you mean, he’s not there?” Miles echoed, looking more engaged with this than he had with anything all morning. “Where else could he be?”

As if the sound of his sergeant speaking had opened a floodgate, the voices began to tumble over one another, twisting and turning until he could barely make them out.

“What if,” Buchan said hesitantly, and his words cut across the others by the sheer sense of doom in them, the rest of the team quieting to hear. “What if there’s someone else in here with us? As in the Sly Driscoll affair. It’s an old house; there have to be lots of spaces in the walls, between floors, and they could be living in one of the empty rooms. What if someone’s picking us off, one by one?”

Which, Chandler decided, was probably the absolute worst thing that he could have said. He could feel the words in his own head, thorns that had stuck there, thorns that no amount of struggling would remove.

“Calm down,” he said, mostly because it needed to be said by somebody. The imperative had more conviction than he felt. The image of another person in the walls was far too easy to conjure. And, though he did his best not to entertain the possibility, the idea that Kent was _gone_ threatened to close his throat. He swallowed in an attempt to find control, reaching for his Tiger Balm. “We need to search. Mansell, Riley, take Buchan and check the first floor, then the second. Miles, you’re with me. _No one_ goes off on their own. Is that understood?”

“What are we doing?” Miles demanded, not moving even as the others made their slow way to their feet, as if walking through dreaming.

“We’re checking this floor, and then we’re checking the exits,” Chandler informed him, because it wasn’t impossible that Kent had decided he could make it to the next town. He preferred it to Buchan’s theory.

“I’m not sure he ever left the floor he was on,” Buchan said hesitantly, the warning glance that Chandler shot him either ignored or not noticed. “With those stairs, no one can move between floors without someone else hearing. And I’m not sure about anyone else, but I didn’t get enough sleep last night that I wouldn’t have heard.”

Miles muttered something that almost sounded like _not unless the house didn’t want us to hear_ , and Chandler chose to ignore it.

“If you find him,” he said to the retreating backs of his DCs and his historian. “Bring him down here, don’t send someone to come and get us.”

“Sir,” Riley acknowledged, and then they were gone.

Miles sat and regarded him for what felt like half an hour before he spoke.

“What do you think of this, then?” he asked. “Someone in the walls? I doubt things like that happen to a detective more than once in their career.”

“We’ll see when we find Kent,” Chandler said, glancing around the doorway into the kitchen. He didn’t expect his missing DC to be in there, not in the few minutes since Buchan had emerged, but it was good to be thorough.

Miles didn’t challenge his choice of conjunction, and he was grateful for that. It made him feel as if they were both mutually certain. He turned back to the dining room, and watched his sergeant straightening from having peered under the table. _Being thorough_ , Chandler told himself, to keep from snapping.

“He’s not in here,” Miles reported. “This floor might take less time than you expected.”

“If we finish, and the others haven’t found him, we can go and have a look around his room,” Chandler decided. _But it won’t come to that_.

Miles made a non-committal noise and headed in the direction of the hall. “So, what did it look like in there? Any signs of a struggle?”

“No,” Chandler said, shaking his head as he followed his sergeant. “It looked like he hadn’t slept in his bed in the night.”

“So, he might have been gone last night?”

“Maybe.” Chandler sighed. “Or maybe he just didn’t sleep. It seems that there’s a lot of that going around.”

“Not here, either,” Miles announced, and Chandler winced. Each confirmation of a place where Kent wasn’t somehow felt as if it were making it less and less likely that he would be anywhere. “Do you want to look at the front door while I try the utility room?”

“We don’t separate,” Chandler reminded him, and Miles turned his head so that he could see the raising of his sergeant’s eyebrows.

“We’d hardly be in different continents,” Miles muttered.

“Nevertheless.” Chandler paused, his fingers reaching for a rubber band that hadn’t been there in far too long. “Kent was in the room right next to mine, Miles.”

Miles made another noise, this one hopefully a concession of the point. He stepped into the porch and tried the outer door with one hand. Then he tried it with both hands.

“Locked,” he concluded, succinctly, turning back toward Chandler. “Just like it’s been since Thornton left. And there aren’t any signs that it’s been tampered with. The windows are shut, too, so he’s still in the building.”

“Just one last room, then,” Chandler concluded, stepping sideways to lead Miles into their final chance. A row of washing machines gaped at him, and he did his best to ignore them. He had never been in a utility room as large as this – usually all they needed was space for washer and dryer. But this one seemed to have far too much empty space at the end of it, beyond the devices. He headed for it, and the floor beneath his feet growled a protest as of trying to warn him off.

“Doesn’t look like he’s in here, either,” Miles commented from behind him, but Chandler held up a hand.

“Wait,” he said, nudging aside a ratty carpet with one shoe. Beneath it, the floor was deeply scarred by a single regular line.

“Trapdoor,” he announced, pushing the rest of the rug aside to reveal a metal ring at the edge.

“You think Kent might be down there?” Miles asked, doubtfully.

“We need to check it whatever I think,” Chandler informed him, tugging at the door.

It swung open easily, without a squeak of hinges. Odd, he decided, given the state of disrepair that the stairs were in. The space below was a great cavernous maw, yawning so that he could see its teeth, and he peered into its darkness, struggling to see in the meagre light that the utility room bulb offered.

“What’s down there?” Miles demanded, and he squinted.

“Not a lot, by the looks of it,” Chandler replied. He shifted, placing one tentative foot on the first step and testing it for rot. It didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and he moved again, climbing down into the dark and fighting the panic swelling in his throat. He tried not to think about the last time that he had been _down_ , but the memory knew its power and it dug tenacious claws into his brain.

He held his breath, trying to convince himself that he was in control of it. Tried to reach for stillness and calm, only for his arm to twitch spasmodically, to remind him that he didn't have any power over anything.

His eyes narrowed into the black, and slowly, it turned into different shades. Behind him, he heard the first thud of Miles’ feet on the steps as his sergeant followed.

“What do you see?” the older man asked. “Any sign of Kent?”

“I’m not sure.” Chandler struggled to make sense of the blurred shapes, and slowly they resolved themselves. The edge of a wall, the start of the floor, maybe a pipe. Closer than that, and the breath froze into needles in his neck at the sight of a sad huddle of a shape, like someone curled on their side, fetal. “Miles!” He jerked his head toward it, because his voice was twisting with a fear that he didn't want heard.

His eyes were riveted to the body, waiting for it to shift, struggling to convince himself that it would, but the rest of his mind laughed at that, because nothing that meant anything to him ever survived. He couldn’t move, but Miles was already stepping past him, though in the room above, the bulb was starting to flicker, casting the room into a weak strobe, the floor snarling.

“Miles,” he said again, but that was all he managed before he was cut off by a sound like tortured metal. He glanced around in time to see the trapdoor slam, and then nothing but the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is up a bit later than I had hoped - turned out there was more work for tomorrow than I had thought, and I am now officially behind on my NaNo. And it turned out that I _really_ didn't like my draft for this chapter and half the thing needed to be reworked. It is a bit longer than usual, though, if that helps. But anyway. Hopefully, I'll have the next chapter up for Friday. In the meantime, thanks very much for reading and for the kudos! ^.^


	9. Chapter 9

Mansell was walking close enough to Riley that their shoulders crashed together every few seconds, and even he could barely hear what she was saying. It seemed as if the stairs had grown louder, the thunder-rush of a storm-sea which had risen to drag them all away.

“I just don’t see how he could be anywhere but on this floor,” Riley half-shouted, wincing as her movement caused a sound like nails down a blackboard. “Just listen to that.”

Waiting for Buchan’s inevitable doom-filled proclamation, Mansell almost missed a step and barely saved himself from falling upwards onto the first landing. Whatever prophecy of destruction was brewing in the historian’s head stayed there, unusually, and he was grateful for that.

“Where should we start?” he asked, because they wouldn’t find Kent if all they did was spout various theories about how he could possibly have gone missing. And once they found him, he would be able to tell them.

“Kent’s room,” Riley decided, offering them both a grim smile. “Might be something that the boss didn’t see. Hopefully Kent.”

A few more seconds, and that hope was dashed on the rocks like a rowing boat in a tsunami. In Mansell’s opinion, there had never been a room as empty of evidence, in the history of both rooms and evidence, as this one. Maybe Buchan could have confirmed it.

“Looks like he only moved in five minutes ago,” he muttered disgustedly. His own room was a mess, though Kent’s was more empty than _tidy_. He glanced through the door into the bathroom, and found a lack of either Kent or anything that might be useful in finding him. It was too bright in there to be so useless, the white-clean porcelain of everything gleaming in the mirror and striking up the beginnings of a headache in the back of his skull.

Mansell turned back into the main room in time to see Buchan straightening from checking under the bed, and resisted the impulse to snap.

“He doesn’t appear to be here,” the historian announced, voice the same timbre as that of a tour guide. “Shall we move on?”

Mansell led the way out, glancing at Riley and wondering if he should offer her some sort of raised-eyebrow-and-smirk combination at the prospect of looking for Kent in the boss’ room. After all, acting as if everything was normal might make the situation feel a little better, somehow.

She was looking past him, and then the door handle was turning under his hand and it was too late.

There was no sign there, anyway. And Mansell could feel the fear starting to stir, fear that felt like the empty space at McCormack’s desk.

Across the hallway, Buchan’s room. The historian had brought more books than could possibly be healthy, but there was no sign, and he could see the slump he could feel in his own shoulders sloping into the others’. The creases etching deeper into their foreheads with each place they found empty.

“Erica’s going to kill me,” Mansell found himself muttering as they turned towards the last door, breathing out hard through his nose.

“Not if whatever took DC Kent gets you first,” Buchan said, his eyes as wide as if all the lights had been switched off. Mansell doubted that he had meant it to be comforting.

“Shut up,” Mansell snapped, knocking on the skipper’s door with a little more force than necessary. He could feel Riley’s gaze on him, questioning. He hadn’t knocked on the others, he knew, but somehow he hoped that if he did something differently, the end result would be different, too. “Kent!”

There was no answer, and the silence stretched as if on a rack. But Mansell, immobilised by his need for a response, couldn’t move to break free of the waiting, and it was Riley who shoved past him to open the door.

Mansell trailed after her, his eyes on the ground. He knew what they would find, but the stupid desperate hope inside his head fluttered anyway, a moth, and he if he looked up and confirmed the nothing that he knew was there, it would be as if it had flown into an open flame.

No one said that there was no sign, but he could tell it from the tone of the silence. He tried to turn his listening downwards, deciding that Chandler and Miles were about to call up that they had found Kent. He imagined the way that their voices would sound, muffled but audible, the noise of their feet on the stairs as they rushed down, steps lighter than before.

It had to be imagined, because he wasn’t about to hear it.

“To the next floor, then?” Buchan said softly, breaking the quiet into shards. “We have two more to go, after all.”

_Two more_ , Mansell repeated to himself. Kent would be on one of them, and he would be alive. Riley would hug him, and then she would slap him upside the head for worrying them. He would act like he’d never even been concerned, and the boss wouldn’t have that frantic look in his eyes any longer.

The sound of Riley’s feet on the stairs shattered his illusion, and he had to force himself to move through the real world again.

“We would have heard him,” she repeated, almost to herself. “There’s no way we wouldn’t have.”

“It’s like he just vanished into thin air,” the historian said hesitantly, offering her a mournful glance. “Even with someone in the walls, there would surely have been signs of a struggle. There would have been something.”

“We’ll find him,” Mansell said, because one of them needed to keep saying it. “And he’ll be fine.”

“If he was fine, don’t you think that he would have come to find us and tell us that himself?” Buchan retorted, the tone of his voice suggesting that he hated the holes he was picking, but felt that they needed to be picked. “I’m not trying to be the voice of doom –”

_Really?_ Mansell thought. _But you’re so good at it._

“– but someone needs to say it.”

They turned onto the second floor, and Mansell strode ahead to open his door, then wasn't sure what to do with the extra time. Perhaps he had assumed that the ten seconds before Riley and Buchan joined him would be sufficient to tidy his room into something vaguely acceptable.

It wasn’t.

“How did you manage to do this, when we’ve only been here three days?” Riley enquired, and he wondered if he should shoot her a glare and mutter something about there being a time and a place for a commentary on his lack of cleanliness.

“It’s not so bad,” he retorted instead, because the anxious pull to her face knew exactly what was happening. “You can see the floor.” _But not Kent. Not Kent, because he’s not here. He isn’t anywhere _.__

“As much as it would be scientifically interesting to stay here and study what is no-doubt a thriving colony of bacteria,” Buchan said, hovering in the doorway as if he wasn’t quite brave enough to step inside. “Should we check the next room?”

“You mean, my room?” Riley muttered, and Mansell would have given her a significant glance, if Kent hadn’t been missing.

All the same, he was grateful to shut his own door behind him. As the others headed over to her room, he found himself looking across the hall, and wondering how many other places they had to search, given that the doors across from them were locked.

He was still wondering, trying to hide from the answer that his mind had found, when Riley and Buchan left her room, and Buchan immediately hurried over to the first of the unoccupied ones. Mansell opened his mouth to stop the historian from wasting his time.

“That’s – ”

The handle turned under Buchan’s hand and the door opened inward.

“– locked,” Mansell finished, exchanging confused glances with Riley.

“Aren’t you going to join me?” Buchan called from inside the unoccupied room.

Mansell and Riley tried to go through the door simultaneously, and their shoulders impacted, Mansell stumbling off sideways as she overtook him and then hurrying after her.

Mansell didn’t know what he’d been expecting. The room was almost completely empty – it made Kent’s look as bad as his. No sheets on the bed, no one _under_ the bed, just a room with the minimum fittings and barely any dust.

“I could have sworn they were both locked,” Mansell said, and Riley nodded, looking more than a little disconcerted.

“Why would anyone have unlocked the doors?” she demanded, as Buchan checked the bathroom.

“I think the question is _who unlocked the doors_ ,” Mansell told her, and her face twisted, troubled.

“I didn’t think there was anyone else here,” Buchan said, emerging from the bathroom. “Other than us. Maybe you just turned the handles the wrong way?”

“Maybe,” Riley said, but she didn’t sound convinced. Mansell supposed that they could talk about that after they had found Kent. Maybe their absent colleague would have some answers.

“He’s not here,” Mansell pointed out, unable to think of it as one room closer to the one where he was any longer. Not when it felt like there was suddenly a possibility for him to be in none of them. “Next room.”

They were out in the hall, pausing for Buchan to shut the door behind them, when he heard it. A clattering from the floor above, like dominoes falling, followed by a wave-break crash.

“Did you hear _that_?” Riley asked, a frown twisting her face.

Mansell was running almost before his brain had computed the positive answer for her, the stairs shrieking at his passing, a slam like a car crash snapping against his ears as his feet hit the upper landing. He barely heard Riley and Buchan shouting after him amongst the noise, but he didn’t look back, there wasn’t _time_ for him to look back. Not when one of the doors along the hall was slightly ajar, promises leaking out like the end of Pandora's Box. He ran for it, half-expecting it to slam shut and lock in front of his eyes, hope shuddering in his throat, a desperate excitement that wouldn’t let him breathe, no matter how much he knew that he needed to.

Even with his sprint, it felt as if he would never reach the door. It was too far away and far too important.

Then his hand grazed at the whorled wood of the its panels, and he shoved it wide.

The room beyond was almost completely empty. No furniture, just a wooden floor scarred as if by acne. And, curled on the far side with his back to the door, Detective Constable Emerson Kent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I did mean to get this one up on Friday, but in my defence I had new Friday lectures and failed to time-manage. If it helps, I am also about ten thousand words behind on my NaNo. I don't know why it would help, but there we go. I'll try and put the next one up before the end of the day because otherwise I'll owe you a chapter and my schedule will get confusing.


	10. Chapter 10

“Mansell!”

Riley’s shout glanced uselessly off the slab of wood that had fallen down between them and the next floor. Between them and Mansell. There was no reply, and she slammed one fist into the underside of the trapdoor, her knuckles stinging with the savagery of her strike, though the only response from the obstruction was a dull thud.

“Mansell!” she yelled again, shaking off Buchan’s hand as it found its way to her arm. It returned itself, insistent, and she turned her head to glare at him. “We need to get this open.”

He shook his head vehemently, though his hands were still shaking with the suddenness of the trapdoor’s descent. Riley could still hear the echoing of its crash in her head. 

“We should go back down and tell the others,” Buchan said, voice frightened but reasonable, and she could feel herself calming. “I doubt we’ll be able to open this on our own, they’ll be able to help us.”

Riley hesitated, glancing towards where she had lost sight of Mansell. “Ed, he’s on his own up there. The boss said we shouldn’t split up.”

“That floor,” Buchan said, pointing upwards. “By process of elimination, is the floor where young Kent is. He’s not on his own, and we’ve no reason to think that he’s hurt, but Joe still needs to know what happened.”

Riley gave the trapdoor above them one last glance. She could see the sense in what Buchan was saying, but the idea of leaving Mansell made her teeth ache, and her feet dragged with the weight of it when she turned. 

“Fine,” she said, her heels kicking against the steps as she turned back down the stair. “Let’s go, we can be back up here in –”

“Meg!” Buchan grabbed her arm again, yanking her back so hard that her head impacted with the ground in a crack of white sound. She turned her head to snap at him, but was cut off by a noise louder than a gunshot. Another trapdoor slammed across the way down, so quickly that it could have taken her feet off if she had kept going.

Riley breathed out hard, and tried to ignore the rushing through her head that told her she should never have stayed a detective. It was louder than it had been since the death of Crispin Wingfield, and it took her a moment to steady herself, rubbing at her head.

As if her movement had shocked him from his own frozen-rabbit panic, Buchan darted forward, scrabbling at the edge of the trapdoor. He didn’t seem to notice his nails tearing as he clawed and clawed, the obstruction refusing even the slightest movement.

“Help me,” he pleaded, his eyes wide and desperate. “We have to open it, we have to get to Joe...” He let his voice trail away, his attention turning back to his task.

Riley moved shakily to his side, gingerly putting her weight on the edge of the trapdoor. It didn’t move, more stable than a lot of the paving stones she had walked over. And it wouldn’t move, no matter how hard she and Buchan stamped or jumped on it, and they couldn’t get enough purchase on the side to drag it upwards.

“We can’t move this one,” she said, and her voice sounded dead with calm to her own ears as she sat back. “Not on our own.”

“We can’t give up,” Buchan told her, not looking up from the door, words jittering out of his mouth. “Joe!” he yelled, and she could hear the strain. “ _Joe_!”

“Skip!” she called, seeing the value in it and adding her voice to his. She stamped as hard as she could on the edge of the door, then shouted again. “Skip!”

Riley wasn’t sure how many times she cried out, but her voice turned raw with it, even with them both beating against the wood.

Eventually, she sat away. She tipped her head back into one of the steps and tried not to hear the word _trapped_ as it rattled around her skull, only to feel Buchan’s eyes on her, his pupils frantic.

“Why have you stopped?” he demanded. “We have to get back down, we have to, otherwise we’ll be trapped on this floor, and we can’t –”

“Ed, this one’s not going to open,” she said, lifting her voice over the shaking of his head. “We can’t make it open. It’s too heavy.”

“Then we try the other one,” he declared, springing towards the other end, with all the energy that terror gave. “If we can get Mansell down here, maybe all three of us will be able to open it.” He bolstered his shoulder against the upper door and shoved against it, as hard as he could. “Help me!”

Riley did as he said, but it was like trying to lift the top slab off a dolmen. The only result was an ache starting up in her back, each one of her vertebrae launching their own individual complaints.

“It’s not working,” she told him, in as firm a tone as she could muster. “Ed, we have to try something else.”

“There is nothing else,” Buchan snapped, his voice so high with panic that there was no sting in it. “Someone must be doing this, we don’t know who they are, but they’re keeping us here, on this floor. They’re keeping us all separate, and the only way that we can get out is through these trapdoors. And we have to get out because this is where they want us to be and we can’t stay here, we can’t. Please, Meg.”

Riley reached for something to say which would reassure him, but there wasn’t anything. Not when she could feel her own fear twisting inside her stomach, threatening to explode upwards in words like the plumes of fire from a volcano. Anything she did say would be like pouring oil onto flame.

Into her silence, the noise reached. The slamming. It was the doors furthest from them first, jerking their heads up as if they were on strings. There was enough time for horror to creep over Riley’s face, hatefully and inexorably slow, before the others slammed, too, and then came the clicks, the locks turning, though there were no keys. Shutting them out.

A buzzing sound started up in Riley’s head, grating against her teeth, and she swallowed in an attempt to disperse it, swaying on her feet for a moment on her way to check the first door.

The static only grew louder, reverberating over the inside of her skull, and she scratched her fingers over her temples as the pressure built.

“Do you hear that?” Buchan asked her, and when she turned her head toward him she could see the noise in the set of his face, almost like nausea.

She nodded, and he turned back to the trapdoor, beating against it with renewed desperation, his fists bouncing ineffectually away, the skin scuffing.

“We need to try these,” she shouted, unable to hear the sound of her normal voice over the insidious buzzing, shoving at the first of the doors with her shoulder. “That’s not going to give.”

He moved to the door opposite and tried the same, with as little success as she had had. The white noise slowly grew louder, building static in her skull. She kicked at the door, but all it did was send judders up her shin, a counterpoint to the pressure in her head.

Their attempts to break through did nothing except increase the noise. Riley rattled the handle in frustration, and then increased her efforts. The sound felt more like a headache now, pulsing steadily towards a migraine, and there was no way of telling where it was coming from. It was everywhere, shaking her bones into instability.

The lights went out. The sudden darkness was almost pale against her eyes for an instant, and she struggled away from panic, trying to ground herself with the cold of the door handle. As she gripped it, the metal suddenly became uncomfortably warm, and then too hot. She couldn’t let go, and her eyes rolled back in her head, the static fizzing in bright bursts of colour.

The white noise ceased abruptly, and so did her thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, thanks for reading. It’s been a bit weird coming back to this – I’ve been writing/plotting the other stories in the series, and they’re basically hurt/comfort central. Sorry if these two chapters aren’t up to scratch – I find myself not liking them very much. But anyway, thanks again for your support, and I hope to upload the next chapter on Tuesday. ^.^


	11. Chapter 11

The black pushed in on all sides, uncompromising and unending, and Miles’ senses refused it. They scrabbled over the inside of his skull, finding the sickly drippings of the Whitechapel-streetlamp gold and clinging to them, desperate for even the faintest memory of the light.

He would never be too old to be afraid of the dark. Bolting, rabbit-like, back toward the trapdoor, his feet caught against the first step in his haste, pitching him forwards. His hands snatched at the rail, arresting his fall, and then his head was grazing at the underside of the floor, fingers reaching up to shove.

It wouldn’t move. But that didn’t make sense, because before Chandler had lifted it with barely any trouble at all, so something must have changed. If falling was all that it had done, it would have been moveable.

For a moment, his mind provided him with an image of Louise Iver, smiling maliciously to herself under that hat of hers, before she wandered away, her footsteps far too quick, far too easy, for those of an old woman. He snarled it away, thankful that the boss couldn’t see the cast of his face in the darkness. She wouldn’t have followed them all the way out to Wales, not when Tŷ Gors did a good enough job on its own.

“Oi, boss,” he said, when his second push pressed an ache into his shoulders. “I need some help with this.”

There was a moment of still, as if Chandler’s brain was a computer with far too many tabs open to run any of them quickly, stalling. The quiet stretched, and Miles opened his mouth to speak again, only for the DI to beat him to it.

“Of course,” he said, and the words were far firmer than they had needed to be, as if their pressure alone were keeping Chandler intact. Miles waited, wondering if the boss’ psyche would stretch as far as allowing movement, or whether shifting would splinter whatever fragile walls had been raised. Eventually, his ears picked up a shuffling, his hearing sharpening as, devoid of sight, he moved to rely on it. 

“On three?” Chandler suggested, and he sounded as fragile as Miles knew he would look. “One. Two. Three.”

They both pushed together, and Miles could feel the sting of the splinters as they embedded themselves into his skin. The barrier remained, as if they were little more than insects trying to shift a boulder. He kept on at it anyway, though his bones shook as if he had been out for hours in the chill that kept them prisoner.

“Miles,” the boss said, and he sounded lost, the syllables coming more quickly as he spoke. “Miles, it won’t open. It’s not moving at all. Stop.”

“It’ll move,” Miles growled, one of his joints cracking, as if the trapdoor were Louise Iver, or Mansell, jibing about his age. He only shoved at it harder, the cold sticking to his teeth as he peeled his lips back.

“ _Miles_!”

Chandler paused, and Miles could hear him breathing, trying to steady himself, before he continued, more quietly. “It’s not going to open, we’ll need to find another way out.”

Miles lowered his hands, squinting when he knew that they were passing his face, but there wasn’t even a silhouette. The boss was right, and shoving away at an immovable obstacle was only going to make their situation worse. Every second that it didn’t shift, the panic would multiply in their heads like pins and needles.

All the same, as he placed one careful foot on the first step down, something in his head snarled that he should never have given up. That that, more than anything, would bring him down.

“Don’t suppose you have a torch, boss?” It was too much to hope for, but if anyone was going to be in the habit of carrying a light with them, it would be the boss. Might say so in one of his manuals.

“I’m afraid not,” Chandler replied, though he sounded distracted, as if he had been searching his pockets for one. “Kent?”

Miles wasn’t certain whether or not the last was directed toward him, or toward the hypothetical detective constable. He left it unanswered, and no one else filled in the gap. In the silence, he could almost hear the worrying as it lodged behind his sternum, more like a manta ray than a butterfly.

If it had been Kent, if he had been alive and all right and awake, he would have already spoken to them. And if he had been all of those things, he wouldn’t have been down here anyway.

“Do you remember where…?” Chandler let his voice trail off, as if he wasn’t exactly certain of how to refer to the shape that they had barely been able to make out even with the trapdoor open.

“Over here,” Miles informed him, brushing past his boss, toward the huddle. “Do you really think that it might be Kent? He’s not talking back.” He paused, feeling his foot nudge something, and crouched, though from the weight of it, it could have easily been just dead leaves.

“He could be hurt,” Chandler pointed out, voice stifled as if he had had to strangle the idea out of his throat.

Miles stretched out a hand, and his fingers encountered a dry smoothness. More like wood than a person, he decided. “Unless he went very bald very quickly, it’s not Kent,” he announced, hoping that the image that went with the words might at least spark one of those almost smiles. He prodded at what should have been a shoulder, wondering if it might be the sort of dummy that they practiced lifesaving on. It seemed to have a jumper, the wool stretching alarmingly around his poking, and he moved down the sleeve.

He shut his eyes tightly as a glow punched through his retina, then opened them a little. What had seemed, for a moment, brighter than the northern lights, still failed to properly illuminate anything.

“My watch,” Chandler offered, and then the light blinked away again. “I thought that it might help. But, well.” It hadn’t. “I’ll go and see if I can find anything to get the trapdoor open with.”

Miles grunted his understanding, ready to stand and help as his hand found the end of the sleeve, his skin brushing against what felt like old dry twigs, light but still with a sort of odd weight to them.

“Boss,” he said, before he had managed to work out the best way of bringing it up, a swallow bisecting his sentence. “This is a skeleton.”

The sound of Chandler’s breathing stopped completely. When it came back, it was faster, harsher, frantic. Miles cursed to himself, straightening up, ignoring the complaints of muscles that had decided that they had done enough that day against the trapdoor.

“Boss?” he asked, but there wasn’t an answer, and he needed to find something to say, his mind spinning like a fruit machine, in search of the right words. He doubted that _on the bright side, it’s almost definitely not Kent_ would be particularly helpful. “Boss. It’s not Kent. We haven’t found him, as far as we know, the others haven’t found him. And if we’re in a situation like this, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in one, either, or they might have come looking for us by now. They need us to get out of here, so that we can help them, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” He hesitated, and the fruit machine came back, whirring. “After all, Buchan’s not going to be able to do it if it didn’t happen at least hundred years ago and even then he’ll just monologue about it.”

“He’s not that bad,” Chandler said after a beat. Sounding a little stronger, Miles tried to convince himself. “Can you tell what killed him?”

Miles snorted incredulously, turning back toward the skeleton. “In this dark, I doubt even Llewellyn could. We should have brought her down here. Her and a torch. We’d be prepared for anything. Can you get your watch down here?”

The brush of metal against his hand forced a shudder through his shoulder bones, the watch as cold as if Chandler had left it outside overnight, but he grasped at it anyway, turning it toward the offending huddle.

He could vaguely make out the deep holes of the eye sockets, shadows thrown into the pits to contrast with the smooth white of the bone, cast into a dull luminescent green. The teeth grimaced, and Miles felt himself returning the expression.

“Just looks like bones to me,” he said, eventually. “Though I’ve probably missed something obvious.” 

“Who do you think he was?” Chandler wondered aloud, crouching on the other side of the body, the faint outline of his hands barely visible. “Another guest, perhaps?” 

“We can investigate the crime once we’re no longer in danger of becoming one,” Miles informed him gruffly, standing abruptly, his limbs complaining that he was far too old to need to peer at anything on the floor quite so closely. “Or, we could inform the locals and go back to Whitechapel. I never want to have to see this house again.” 

“Of course,” Chandler said, and Miles heard his clothes shifting as he stood, too. “I thought there might be something relevant to our situation.” 

Miles shrugged. “Our situation was supposed to be team building,” he growled, the words suddenly tasting savage in his mouth. “Bridges and pipes and falling into each other’s arms.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Chandler suggested, and he sounded the way that nausea felt. “Maybe the point of this place is to drop us into the sea and have us drown or build a life raft together.”

“That would make our friend here one of the people who failed,” Miles said, and the implications of it dropped into his stomach like a rock. By the silence, that was how Chandler felt, too.

After all, they were the team who had been beaten to a trophy by _traffic_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. It's not Tuesday. If there's anyone still reading, thank you for your patience - I cannot say when I'll have the next chapter ready by, but hopefully it will be soon.


	12. Chapter 12

Buchan came to slowly, thoughts stuttering back like drips from a burette. The pain in his head was already there, when he gathered enough of himself to recognise it, an endless slow buzz that reminded him of his time at university. He rolled over, half-expecting to be fully woken by the jolt of the impact when he rolled out of his accommodation bed, only for his dulled mind to inform him that he was already _on_ the floor.

He opened one eye, which showed him very little but the expanse of boards he was lying on, slightly blurred, and the edge of his nose, even less clear. The light narrowed the pain in his skull into the turning of a screw, and he closed the lid again. Struggled not to press his face inwards to hold it shut, the headache brutal enough without the tension of a furrowed brow.

“It’s about time you woke up.”

For a moment, he didn’t know the voice. He prodded into his mind, searching for some form of recognition, and the years that had passed hit him, a train-crash to the sternum. He wasn’t still at university. Hadn’t been for quite some time. Which begged the question of why he had a hangover, given that he had always considered himself a responsible drinker.

He prodded again, and the memories slotted into place like the last pieces of a jigsaw. The noise, the darkness. And Meg Riley. It had been her voice, but with an unfamiliar sharp edge, as if it was his fault that he had been rendered unconscious.

Buchan carefully opened both his eyes, but she wasn’t standing within his field of vision. He shifted tentatively, holding his breath and waiting for the inevitable stab of red through his skull. It didn’t come, and he sat up carefully, his arms shuddering with the sudden weight of his leaning on them.

The room was bare enough that it would have made a Spartan miserable, just a bed, covered by the drifting of a dust-sheet. Riley was standing over by the door, rattling at the handle as if she were trying to get out, all tense, angry angles.

“What happened?” he asked, rubbing at his forehead in an attempt to warn it that he was contemplating getting up. His eyes fizzed oddly with the idea, and he decided to postpone it.

“I don’t know,” she snapped, without turning, though her attempts to open the door froze. “I woke up here, and while you’ve been enjoying your nap, I’ve been trying to find us a way out.”

“It looks like we’re in one of the unoccupied rooms,” Buchan offered, speaking quickly, trying to cover the sting that her words had left in his head. “On the same floor. And the noise is gone in here. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be anything dang–”

“What’s your point?” she spun to face him, her eyes glacial. “Are you suggesting that we should just wait meekly here for whoever did this to come and kill us, or whatever they want to do?”

“No,” Buchan began, his voice squeaking with the shock of her anger, but she ploughed straight over his protest.

“Because I’m not about to stand for that. There’s no way that we’re going to learn anything in here, and if you were any sort of detective, you’d want to get out, too.”

She stopped talking, then, whirling on her heel to turn her back again, but there was nothing that he could have said in reply to that, anyway. His head was suddenly empty of words, as if she had scorched them all away. Eyes widened, he stared at her, wondering if perhaps her headache was worse than his, if she somehow blamed him for the way that he had panicked back in the hallway. And he supposed that maybe, if he had been calmer, they might have been able to consolidate their efforts and escape.

Buchan kept his mouth shut, digging his jaws together, unwilling to allow himself to speak again. A swallow constricted his throat, and that seemed far too loud a noise. He saw it grate against Riley’s back, and ducked his head, worried that she would snap again.

Maybe it was his inaction that was causing the tightening in her shoulders. He stood, almost tripped over the nothing that was on the floor, his haste rushing the balance from his skull. Steadying himself against the wall, he suddenly remembered the others, and glanced at Riley, considering asking her if she had heard anything. Then he shook his head to himself, deciding that he could do with still having his head firmly attached to his shoulders.

He turned into the bathroom and started knocking against the sides, testing for hollowness. Whatever had shut them in here, he reasoned, would have had to have crossed the hall to slam both trapdoors, but they hadn’t noticed anything. So he had to have been right about something in the walls, someone who had been able to trip both traps without them seeing.

All he got were the usual noises that bricks made when a person knocked of them, with the exception of one of the pipes’ protesting hisses. But it was better than Riley’s voice, twisting in ways that it shouldn’t have done, almost shouting. Shot through with loathing that she really meant, as if she had always hated him and just grown good at hiding it.

He checked the bathroom walls again, rather than go back out and face her, only for her to appear in the doorway, her face bunched angrily, jaw working.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, the words almost as vehement as physical blows, lashing against him.

“Looking for a way out,” he replied, trying to sound as if he was self-assured in his defence, but the syllables wouldn’t stop shaking. “Like you said we needed to.”

“If this is your version of trying to escape, it’s no wonder we had to come and rescue you from Diggory,” Riley snapped, and he felt himself quail back, from her tone and from the memory, the wall bumping into his shoulders. “We need to keep trying the door. With the two of us, we should be able to break it down.”

“Right,” Buchan said, though he was unwilling to walk forwards, towards her and the tense anger of her stance. “Yes.”

She turned away with an irritated sigh, and he followed her out into the main room, movements as hesitant of those of a mouse, hoping that the cat had gone.

“I’ve not heard anything from the others,” she informed him, brusquely. “Though hopefully they’ve had better luck than me.”

_Me, not us_ , Buchan’s mind echoed. _Because her bad luck is being shut in here with me._ He glanced at the ground, desperate to believe that she didn’t mean what she said, but unable to do so, not when he could read it in her face.

“Whoever’s done this,” he found himself saying, hoping that it would be his friend who answered. “They’ve very deliberately separated us into three groups of two. What do you think they were trying to achieve by it?”

“Maybe,” Riley said, her teeth in the words. “They were hoping that we’d kill each other. I’m not sure I’m going to disappoint them.”

Buchan’s entire body stalled, recoiling from the prospect of her proximity, needing to rush back into the bathroom and slam the door to keep her out. His head jerked up instinctively, waiting for the attack. But his eyes dragged downwards, trying to stare through the floor to where Joe would be, mind struggling to convince himself that help was on its way. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been trying to work out a new uploading schedule to fit with my new timetable, so hopefully I should be able to start putting chapters up more regularly. I'll try and have the next one up before the end of the day, though no promises. Thanks very much for reading!


	13. Chapter 13

“Kent!” Mansell called, and it felt like the volume of it battered the threat of a headache into the top of his brain. Or maybe that was the severity with which his eyes raked over the huddled figure, in search of life. “Oi, Kent!”

There was no response. Not even the slightest of twitches, a flinch at the noise. Kent lay still, and Mansell swore, his initial euphoria at locating his colleague, his _friend_ , draining away as if his shout had opened a sluice gate in his head.

“I’ve got him!” he announced, voice loud enough that it grated in his throat, and listened for the sounds of Riley and Buchan following him up. There was nothing but silence, broken only by the twisting of Kent’s breathing. Frowning, Mansell turned to step back into the corridor, only for his head to impact hard with the door.

He staggered back from it, hand dabbing blood away from his nose and mind flinching at the sudden red. The floor creaked ominously under his feet, and he froze, his frown deepening as he wiped scarlet fingers on his trousers, the pain forgotten.

When he replayed the last few seconds in his head, he never heard the door slam, and he knew that he hadn’t shut it behind him. He reached out, gripping the handle hard enough for his skin to whiten, but it wouldn’t turn.

It certainly hadn’t been _locked_ a moment ago. Mansell glanced over his shoulder at Kent, wondering if that was what had happened to the other detective. It would explain some things, he supposed, but not his friend’s current state.

That was his problem, he told himself, that, and not the fact that he was stuck too. Because even an open door was no help unless he could get Kent through it. He turned back to the issue at hand, trying to see whether or not his friend was hurt. There was nothing visible, no blood, but his colleague’s face was out of his field of vision. He tried to see something, anything, which could indicate why he wasn’t moving. There was nothing there, and his gaze skipped away.

It was the floor, Mansell realised, his eyes narrowing where they caught on it. There were enough whorls and knots in it to make it look diseased, some of them so rotted that they were more like holes. He tried taking a step forwards, and he could feel it warping beneath his shoes, a whining rising into the air as it complained. The next moment, he had backed away far enough that he could feel the door against his spine.

The boards clearly weren’t safe to walk on, and he had no idea how Kent had managed to get himself over to the other side of the room. Perhaps it had been the luck of small children and mad people.

“Riley!” he shouted again, hoping that there would be an answering call from the other side of the door. One informing him that she was going to go down and fetch the boss and the skipper, because one of them would know what to do. And if neither of them did, they would argue over whatever Buchan said until one of them found a solution. “Buchan! I’ve found him! Riley!”

There was still no response, and he gritted his teeth around the word _alone_ as it struggled to surge into being in his throat. He wasn’t alone. Kent was there. He wasn’t talkative, but he was there, Mansell had found him, and he needed to get them back down to the others.

He gave the room a second look, searching for some sort of way across, but the floor was riddled. Some of the planks almost seemed to have gaps between them, as if the boards had shrunk away from their neighbours, terrified. He tried to find the best way over to Kent, but all he could see was a _least worst_ way, and that wasn’t good enough. Not if he couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t be killed if they tried to use it.

But the floor under Kent didn’t look that stable, either. Mansell’s mind searched frantically through its memories, struggling to build a three-dimensional map of the house, trying to work out what was underneath the room, underneath Kent. For a moment, his brain was completely blank. Then, it found the answer, decided that it was worse than the spinning indecision, and tried to flinch away from it before he could see it. Too late. Stairs. So either he’d fall down them, too, or he’d go straight through them and into one of the rooms below. And it didn’t seem likely to Mansell that he would still be alive if he got there.

_Falling, down and down until there was only the wind rushing past, too fast to breathe the air, and then nothing, nothing at all, and he looked over the edge at that, and he couldn’t find a reason in his head not to_ –

Mansell shook his head, anger crackling through the space where the almost-memory of the void was, and opened his mouth to try calling out again.

“Kent?” he managed, but his voice shook, and he swallowed, trying to calm himself, or at least to sound it, because that was what you were supposed to _do_ when you spoke to terrified people, and if Kent thought he was going to fall through the floor, he probably counted. And it couldn’t hurt. “Mate? You awake? You had us worried there.”

Still nothing, but he was Finlay Mansell, and he was damned if he couldn’t find the words to wind someone up until they spat some choice ones back. Granted, it would have been easier if he had been close enough to make some gestures as well, but he could work with what he had.

“Kent,” he said again, trying to affect the tone of a brother teasing a sibling about a television crush. “The _boss_ was worried. Well, we all were. But he was the one who went looking for you, organised the search and everything.”

He thought that perhaps he saw a twitch in one of Kent’s shoulders, but it might just have been a figment of his imagination. Something he had created, because he needed it so badly. So that he could convince himself that he wasn’t going to lose anything. So that he could believe that he wasn’t what that prank caller had told him he was, not worthless, not alone, and that he was going to keep it that way.

“I think you might actually be in with a chance there,” he went on, but it was difficult to inject his voice with just the right dose of lopsided dickishness to anger Kent when he could feel the pressure of his friend’s life in his head. “Kent?”

Now, there was definitely movement. Not much, just a slow shifting of one of the arms, but Mansell pounced on it as if it was gold.

“I know you can hear me. It’s no good pretending.”

This time, the motion was unmistakable. Kent shifted as if trying to roll over, to turn towards the sound of Mansell’s voice, though the floor growled at him, a dog with bared teeth, and he stopped.

“Mansell?” he said, and his words were barely above a whisper.

“Kent,” he replied, none of his other responses seeming appropriate for the situation. “It’s me. See?”

Kent rolled over properly, as if he didn’t hear the warnings from the boards below, and stared straight through Mansell, his face twisted. His mouth opened slowly, as if he wasn’t sure of the next words, but when they came, they were assured, ponderous as treacle.

“I can’t see a bloody thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I'll endeavour to have the next chapter up as soon as possible.


	14. Chapter 14

Riley found consciousness as abruptly as she had lost it, the air dragging into her lungs as if it were made of bramble. Her skull felt weak around the edges, soggy and flopping, like pizza left in the fridge too long.

She was down, on the floor, and she stayed that way, though the boards were rough against her cheek, threatening splinters. Her eyes opened, just enough for her to see out, twin slits of blue slashed through with the black of her pupils. No one would notice that she was awake, allowing her time to get her bearings without alerting anyone.

The room was mostly empty, what little furniture there was shrouded in dust-sheets. An image came abruptly to mind, her husband watching _Scooby Doo_ with the kids, and she gritted her teeth, the skin of her jaw scraping over the floor. She swallowed, and forced her attention back to the room.

Buchan was there, at the door. She couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but every few moments, a rattle would twist into the air, as if he were struggling with the handle.

Riley sat up slowly, concluding that there wasn’t anyone else in there with them. It took her what felt like five minutes to straighten her spine, her limbs unwilling to move too abruptly, lest her skull trickle out through her nose.

“Ed?” she asked, testing her voice. To her ears, it sounded much as it always did, though to her mind, the vibrations in her throat swelled into her head and shook something vital loose. “What happened? Why didn’t you wake me?”

He turned around, slowly, and her breathing stopped, shocked by the expression on his face. There was something dead-looking in his eyes, something rotted, something that she had almost seen when he had been told that there was another death, one that he hadn’t been able to prevent. But it was different, harder-edged. Directed outwards, at her.

“Because,” he informed her brusquely. “If we had gone downstairs as soon as I had suggested that we did so, we would now be with Joe and Sergeant Miles, instead of shut away up here. You stopped that. I thought that perhaps I would do better on my own.” 

The sting of it forced some of the fuzziness from her head, and she climbed awkwardly to her feet, knees complaining that they could have done with another five minutes. At least, she told them, she could match him for height now. Even with the distance he had been uncharacteristically looming.

“You don’t know that,” she told him, letting her tone move towards angry – she wasn’t to blame for this, neither of them were, and they should be working together to get out of it. “The trapdoor might have closed sooner and we might have been killed. And I don’t know about you, but I’m quite fond of being in one piece. Besides, if you’re going to do so well on your own, why haven’t you opened that door yet?”

He glared her, and for a moment she could have believed all the suspicions that the skipper had had of him during the Ripper case, or what Judy had told her of them, were true. His face was slack of emotion, his eyes as glassy as if someone had embedded two marbles in his head.

He didn’t look human, let alone trustworthy. Riley turned away from his gaze, but her flesh crawled at the feeling of his eyes on her back. She spun back, pretending that she had just been glancing out of the window, taking in the dour white of the Welsh weather. If necessary, her mind informed her, she could smash it, snatch up a spear of glass to defend herself.

“I haven’t been able to open the door,” he said, his voice too devoid of spikes, either of anxiety or anger, for it to be natural. “It’s locked.”

“Let me try,” Riley told him, moving towards the door, only for her limbs to stall as they realised that that meant she would have to go past him. She tried to distract herself with amusement, mind muttering that Buchan would do _brilliantly_ on his own if he was defeated by a locked door, but it was nothing but a hysterical laugh into the crushing dark of her head.

He paced away from the door anyway, and he didn’t seem like Ed anymore, like the man who survived on tea and biscuits in the basement of Whitechapel police station and lit up like a Christmas tree at the sight of a file. His movements were all wrong, too measured.

_Maybe this is what Buchan has really been like all along,_ muttered something in the back of her head. _And you were too distracted by the cardigans and the crush and the eurekas to notice._ After all, what sort of person would want to stay close to detectives, to murder, after something like Diggory happened to them? Anyone ordinary should have run for the hills the moment that anyone had mentioned the name _Kray_.

“If you’re going to try anything,” Buchan growled, gesturing towards the hall with the tense snap of a wrist. “Then I suggest that you try it.”

Riley squared her shoulders and marched to the door, but he hadn’t finished, his words stopping her before she could reach for the handle.

“Not that you’ll manage anything more than I. I’m surprised that you want to try at all, given that you’re the _detective_ who wanted to get a desk job just because she cut her hand.” 

Her teeth ground into one another, but her hand wouldn’t lift to test the handle, no matter how hard she dug her nails into her palms. Because he was right, after all. Detectives were supposed to be brave, like Morse's Sergeant Lewis or the skipper, like her kids thought she was, but she had her family, who needed her, she couldn’t be like that.

_They both have families_ , snapped a traitorous voice in tones that sounded far too much like Buchan’s. _You have no excuse._

The historian was still talking, but she wasn’t hearing what he said any longer. She knew it, all the same, by the savage tones and the burning that she could feel on her back.

“You can’t even try the _door_ ,” were the next words that registered. “Perhaps I really would be better off without you to slow me down.”

It would have been as unimportant as the rest of his snarling, were it not for the sound that accompanied it. A metallic ring, almost like someone flicking a wine glass, but infinitely more savage.

Riley glanced around at him slowly, as if he were a snake that she didn’t wish to startle. Her eyes skipped straight over his face and focussed on the knife in his hand, hypnotised. One of the sharp ones from the back of the kitchen drawer, she decided, all the light drawn into the blade, where it glimmered, trapped like a butterfly with a pin through it.

In that moment, it looked as if the blade was keen enough to slice through the air molecules.

Buchan took a step closer, and the spell snapped, her hand finding the door handle as quickly as if there had never been any barrier. It was stuck for a moment, locked and hopeless, just as the historian had said it was, but he was coming closer, and he had moved her away from the window and she couldn’t get at a weapon of her own. It had never been more essential for any door, anywhere, to open, and yet she couldn’t find a way to make it, panic rising into her lungs, her breath snapped from the air as if she were drowning. Fingers slipped.

“I don’t know why you bother,” he informed her. “I _told you_ that it was locked, though none of you ever listen to me, do you? Because I’m just Ed Buchan, the boss’ little experiment who he keeps in the basement, wheels him out as someone to blame when the cases go nowhere.”

He was near enough now that he blotted out the window, and she pressed herself away from him, doubting that Buchan would be quite so inept with a murder weapon as she had always imagined he would be, bracing herself against the door.

The handle turned beneath her hand, and it opened smoothly. For a moment, she couldn’t move, her thoughts still scattering off a barrier that was no longer there. They both stared, and then she was out and running, and he was after her, only a heartbeat of distance between them.

A distance that could be made up easily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading - you're all lovely. I'll put the next chapter up as soon as I can.


	15. Chapter 15

The muttering had been there for hours now. Or so it seemed, to Miles, with no choice but to hear it, the repetitions scraping over his senses like barbed wire. Part of him wanted to tell the boss to shut up, but the rest of him knew that the frantic silence was worse. At least this way, it felt like they were trying to puzzle a way out of the dark.

“Team building,” Chandler went on, the quiet stuttering up between the syllables like a faulty garden centre fountain. “Team building. About trust and respect and…”

Miles let it trail off in his head. He didn’t need to listen any longer. It felt as if he knew the DI’s mantra better than he knew his own name, the words beginning to carve out a pattern in his mind. He didn’t want them there, twisting obsessively around and around, mocking. Taunting, because he couldn’t see anything in them which would save them.

But there was nothing else to focus on in the dark. Nothing productive, when the black drained away everything except the unsteadiness in his breathing, the knots writhing in his stomach, the desperate widening of his eyes as they searched for the faintest glimmer of light, and found none.

He swallowed, the skin stretching over his knuckles as his hands cracked into fists, trying to ground him. Reached out, like everyone who had ever been lost, for familiar contact, and found that Chandler’s words had changed.

“There must be a way,” the DI said, and it sounded more of a question than a promise. Miles imagined the expression that would go with it, and a moment later, the smell of Tiger Balm stung the air, confirming his suspicions. “There must be. If this is a team building exercise, we just need to work together, listen to one another, to solve the problem.”

One _if_ was far too many to trust their lives to.

The boss started again, voice hitching every few seconds, as if the darkness had stolen the breath from his lungs. Miles could almost have accompanied him, worked out a harmony. _Trust and respect and arriving at a solution by working together, listening_ –

Listening. His mind caught on the word and pounced back into his memory, searching.

_It’s an old house_ , Buchan had said, all those years ago, when the only one missing had been Kent. _There have to be lots of spaces in the walls, between floors._

Miles should have seen it sooner. It was a distant hope, but it was more than they had had a moment ago, and he would go to Chandler with whatever chance he had.

“Boss?” he said, cutting into another repetition. “I think we need to check the walls.”

Under the DI’s derailed staring, the idea seemed suddenly childish, something one of his kids would have come up with.

“Like Buchan said before,” Miles went on anyway, trying to justify it without saying _secret passage_ , because that was ludicrous, and he was a detective. “Hidden doors. That sort of thing.” And if it worked, a part of him decided, he was never going to doubt the Ripperologist again. The rest of his brain dismissed that like a New Year's resolution, and he settled with the idea that he might try to snap at him less.

He waited for the boss’ reply, and he was still waiting when the first knock sounded. In the moment that it took his head to understand what was happening, his legs had taken the step necessary to deliver him to the nearest wall.

Miles rapped until his knuckles were sore with it, skin raw and stuck with what he was fairly certain was the world’s largest collection of splinters. He kept going anyway, working his way along, vaguely conscious of Chandler doing the same on the other side of the stairs. It let the quiet back, but this was a concentrated quiet, a room full of working.

He found the routine quickly. Another step sideways, another crouch, knees creaking and cracking. Another knock, another pause as he listened for a hollow echo. Straighten and repeat, when nothing came. Try to keep believing that it wasn’t an exercise in futility.

“Anything yet?” Chandler called, and Miles swallowed a rush of irritation as if it were heartburn.

“No,” he replied, trying to keep the snap out of his voice, though the boss knew him well enough that he probably heard it anyway. “You?”

“Not yet,” Chandler announced, and Miles searched for optimism in his tone, for an indication that he really believed in the second word. Found nothing but the pitiful wheedling of hope. 

Miles grunted in response, when it seemed that the DI wasn’t going to continue. The noise complemented his latest knock, and was just as fruitless. It must have sounded odd, to anyone able to hear; a mismatched percussion beat and very little else. But they would both keep going anyway, until he and the boss met in the middle, if necessary. Or maybe the others would find them, wrench the trapdoor open and appear in the space, all haloed by flickering light, a set of unlikely angels.

The others, who should have come looking for them by now. Even if – especially if – there was an issue with Kent. Perhaps they had been searching, and the treacherous floor had refused to creak for the DCs as it had done for them, had swallowed them away without a trace and was never going to let anyone find them. Perhaps the house had done to them exactly what it had done to Miles and Chandler, locked them away like dolls it had finished playing with.

What was for certain was that if they got out of this, he was refusing outright to go on a team building exercise ever again. The last one had been bad enough, even before they had lost.

“No worse than being sniggered at by bloody traffic, though, is it?” Miles offered, trying to lighten the grim mood that had settled over the dark and tightened its stranglehold with every empty knock.

Chandler huffed a laugh, but it sounded forced, and that was worse than the quiet had been.

They let conversation die on the floor between them, rot away like the skeleton, because the only noise that mattered was the impact of their blows. 

“I think I’ve got something,” the boss announced abruptly, a flash of watch-glow blooming into the black, showing Miles his location. He moved toward it slowly, wary of tripping over their fellow prisoner in the shadow, though the sudden drilling of excitement in his chest wanted him to rush.

Once Miles was at Chandler’s side, the DI knocked on the wall again, and they both listened for a difference, until long after the sound had fallen off the edge of their hearing. There had been something there, Miles decided, reaching out to rap for himself, mind snatching it from the air the moment it knew what he was looking for. The hollowness, the faintest of promises.

The euphoria of finding it couldn’t have lasted, though he could feel the smile splitting his face when he turned toward Chandler, as if he could have seen an answering expression on the boss’ face.

“There must be a way of opening it,” the DI said, and from the sound of it, he wasn’t looking at Miles, instead favouring the wall. He could almost see the frown that would have taken up residence on Chandler’s face, the sort that pulled his lips apart and made his eyes look as if they wouldn’t blink again.

Miles ran a hand along the wall, fingers catching on a raised, puckered seam that felt like stitches in dead flesh. He grimaced and thumped his fist against it, the skin stretching uncomfortably around his splinters. There was a smooth shifting, silent, as if the door were regularly maintained, and then there was a new black, deeper than what surrounded them, sucking away what little light there was, away into the pit.

“Through there?” Chandler said, with the timbre of an echo, the panic starting to rise in his voice again, fragile and fluttering as autumn leaves.

“I’ll go first,” Miles volunteered, because if he waited for the DI to do it, they would have been there all night. And then there was nothing to do but step into the void and hope that the door didn’t swing shut behind him, leave him alone and trapped in darkness the size of a coffin, while some god somewhere, or Louise Iver, laughed at him.

It wasn’t a box. He supposed that he should be grateful for that, for the way that the hands he stretched out in front of him didn’t graze against more wood. He took a careful step forwards, reminded for an instant of his kids, playing blind man’s buff in the garden, after Judy had made them take it outside so they wouldn’t destroy the TV.

He kept moving, aware of Chandler following carefully after him from the watch-glow that reached tentatively from the man’s wrist, colouring the darkness into different shades of sightlessness. One of his feet impacted with something, and he paused, crouching to investigate when his hands found nothing in front of him.

“There’s stairs here,” he reported, reaching out to test the steps ahead. They whined with his weight, but there was no give to them. Better condition, he decided grimly, than the rest of the house. “Careful.”

They ascended slowly, uncertain of the strength of the floor beneath their feet, Miles doing his best to swallow the desperate breaths, which wanted him to rush upwards, reckless and fast as a swift’s flight, in a frantic search for the sun. His chest ached with them, his stomach roiling as if it had been starved.

Fingertips grazed against something, so slightly that he almost didn’t believe in it. The prospect of the light suddenly felt more painful than its absence had been, an itch skittering along his arms at the idea of its proximity. Close, he told himself, taking another step, his hand flattening against the surface, then sliding along as if he were brushing pencil shavings from a table.

Something cold jarred against his fingers, and he grasped it, turning it almost before his mind had fully processed that it was a handle. There was a clatter from outside, and then the wall swung outwards easily, without a squeak of hinges.

It was like opening the door to an inferno, and though Miles flinched back from the light, his eyes slamming shut, it made no difference. He stepped forwards anyway, Chandler’s impatience prickling against the back of his neck, even though the boss didn’t go so far as to jostle him.

He opened his eyes as far as slits, and the rest of the way when the light didn’t burn like acid. The kitchen almost didn’t look real, the panels of the walls almost the painstakingly designed scenery of a video game. The door snapped back into them, and he blinked at the impact. When he looked again, it was impossible to see where it had been.

Chandler was already gone, striding through to the dining room as if he needed no time at all to catch his bearings, every inch the confident DI that he had tried to seem in those first few days, before the shadows of Whitechapel had come swarming from its depths and showed each of them the other at their worst.

“They’re not here,” the boss called back, and Miles followed, finding Chandler waiting for him in the doorway to the hall, like a dog that had hurried on ahead only to realise that it couldn’t open the gate on its own. Maybe he had remembered that they weren’t supposed to split up.

“Upstairs, then,” Miles concluded, stepping past him, barely noticing the other man’s lack of a reply until he saw what had caused it.

They weren’t going upstairs. Not with the new trapdoor, a mausoleum slab that had descended between them and the others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I found this chapter a bit difficult to edit - I think I rushed it the first time around and then there was a lot of work to do on it. Hopefully I'll be able to get the next one up soon, but knowing me, I probably rushed that one too. I'm really grateful to everyone reading for sticking with me so far, thank you for your support.


	16. Chapter 16

Riley worried at the door handle like a wolf trying to get its teeth through a sheep’s fleece. Her growling might not have been audible, but Buchan could see it in the shape that her back had taken, the scratch of fingernails against the panels. He had taken to giving her a wide a berth as was possible, but that didn’t stop her rage from crashing over his senses, waves against a crumpling cliff.

Eventually, she whirled away from it, striding away towards the window, her movements like a cat’s, smooth with barely restrained fury. There was nothing familiar about it, and he stared as he circled around, away from her, until his back bumped into the door.

“I’ve already worked out that it isn’t going to open,” Riley snapped at him without turning, but she didn’t give him anything else to do, and he turned the handle anyway, this way and that, until it beat out the syllables for the word _futility_.

Over and over again, expecting different results. He tried to tell himself that insanity would be doing nothing, waiting for someone else to come and get them, when as far as he knew, the others could all have found their way into similar situations.

“Are you having any luck with the window?” Buchan found himself asking, trying to distract himself from the idea of it. She gave a short, harsh laugh, the sound like a branch breaking.

“We’re on the second floor, Ed. I’m not going to jump from here, though you’re welcome to try it, if you like.”

Buchan didn’t have the words to reply to that, his fingers hooking uselessly against the door handle, warm from his grip. He could feel his head drooping forward with the weight of what she told him he was, barely managing to stop it before it crashed into the wall.

“Honestly, for a man who’s supposed to be quite intelligent, you didn’t think that through, did you?” Riley went on, each of her syllables dripping with a savage venom that burned hot enough to set him flinching back. “Not that you ever think anything through at all. You got yourself arrested in the Ripper case – yes, Judy told me about that – you got yourself laughed out of the incident room with your first slideshow, and you never learned. Because when it came down to it, how could you ever have thought that I would be interested in someone like you?”

Now his shoulders came up defensively, an attempt to shield himself from the hail barrage of her outburst, but no matter how steadfastly that he kept his back to them, the words ate easily though to his chest.

“Even if I wasn’t married, even if I didn’t have kids,” she went on roughly, and he struggled not to picture the snarl that would have caught on her face. “How could you have believed it?”

_I don’t know_ , Buchan thought miserably, her vehemence not leaving room in the air for any protest. He tried to shut his ears, to ignore his sense of hearing, but her raving sliced through all his feeble attempts, unstoppable as a scythe. He wished that he could have said something, told her that they would talk about it later, if she really hated him this much, that this wasn’t the time because all that mattered was getting out, finding the others.

Riley wouldn’t have listened even if he had been able to open his mouth. Understanding that hurt more than anything that she had said, hurt as if his last few desperate roots had been hauled from the ground, because it wasn’t so very long ago that she had been the only person he could go to with his theories, the only person he could rely upon, and now…

She wasn’t talking anymore. Maybe she never had been, the distance was so great between noise and silence. Buchan risked a glance over his shoulder, and his face turned slack. The knife in her hand threw a shadow across her wrist, looking for a moment like the bracelet of a handcuff. He cringed back from it, from the idea that she was like all of the others that they had worked so hard to stop, a criminal, a killer.

His hand scrabbled for the handle, and this time, it turned and jerked inward. His eyes widened, and then he was jack-rabbiting out into the hall, the movement too frantic to look back and see if she was chasing. The stairs were still blocked, and he swallowed hard, lunged toward the opposite door because he couldn’t get to the others.

It had slammed behind him before he realised that it was Riley’s room that he had fallen into, and by then there was nothing to do but push his back up against the panels and try to gulp down the desperate gasps that he was sure were loud enough to be heard beyond.

There was no crash against his spine, nothing to say that she had come after him, and he stepped gingerly away from the door, struggling to hold his breath as his chest still struggled with movements akin to those of hyperventilation.

The death-rattle from the handle nearly knocked Buchan over, the ferocity of it jerking his limbs, more as if the person that held his strings had started than as if he had.

_It’s open_ , Buchan realised, as the door began to shake, expecting to be rent apart at any moment. _It’s open and she’s going to be in any second, she’s trying to scare me, to make it worse._

Knowing that didn’t make it any better. He could have counted the time before she got in in half-seconds, and he was just standing there, ready to be stabbed. Searching in his head for something, anything, which he could work into a viable plan, all he could find was the noise of her wrenching at the only thing that kept him safe.

Buchan’s eyes skipped around the room, scouring it for something that he could use as a weapon, use to defend himself, but the only thing was Riley’s bag, unpacked and nowhere near heavy enough to even slow her down. Nothing else, no conveniently placed jutting spar of wood or loose board in the floor, nothing that was going to save his life.

No lock on the bathroom door, just like there wasn’t one in his room, and it had been a waste of time to check. Nothing left to do but hide, hide and hope that she wouldn’t bother to look for him.

He had rolled awkwardly under the bed before he realised that it was the most obvious hiding place there had ever been, and then all he could do was stare, wide-eyed, at the slats that held the mattress, because it was too late and the door had stopped rattling.

Buchan closed his eyes hard, hands splaying on the floor beside him, nails digging at the boards. One of the fingers brushed against something, something cold, and he froze, unwilling to look and see that Riley was already in the room, that she had found him, that that was her knife.

His hand shifted again, almost of its own accord, snatching at the icy thing, and it came into his grip as if it were a dog, eager to please a new master.

Though he didn’t dare to open his eyes, Buchan knew exactly what it was. There was no mistaking it, no mistaking the shape or the weight or the comfort that it brought. He held his breath, listening for anything to indicate where Riley was, though the panic was gone now, replaced by a simple, quiet calm. A sense of peace which only grew as he raised the gun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I'll have the next chapter up as soon as possible.


	17. Chapter 17

Kent’s words were greeted by silence. It stretched, almost impossibly, as if Mansell’s brain wouldn’t compute what it had just been told. Despite the way that each passing second shrieked in his head, Kent didn’t blame him. He couldn’t really understand it himself, and he could feel the air on his eyes, knew that they were open, but there was still no seeing.

The quiet swelled, uncomfortable against the inside of his head, and the possibility suddenly occurred that Mansell had gone. That he was alone again, alone in his own personal darkness with no idea of either where he was or how to get back to the others. _Alone_ had the same shape in his mind as terror, and his breathing hitched, the air rushing in and out of his lungs, barely stopping to catch in a rapidly drying throat. He twitched with his attempts to stay still, stay calm, fingers convulsing against the floor, scrabbling to find something to hold on to.

Beneath him, the planks shifted and made a noise like metal struts being tortured into circles.

“Don’t move, mate.”

Mansell’s voice again. So he hadn’t gone, hadn’t left Kent like Kent had left him. That should have made it better, but the panic had lodged in his neck, swelling there like some sort of poisonous toad, and he couldn’t breathe in enough air past it, no matter how quickly or deeply he inhaled.

“Kent, _don’t move_.”

He hadn’t realised that he had been. He did his best to stop it anyway, but the more he tried, the more it felt as if it were impossible to really be still, ever, for anyone, and he could feel the floor warping under the pressure of his hands, even as he held his breath trying to stop them from jerking. The question of why he shouldn’t move rose into his head, and for a moment he wanted to ask, but he told himself that talking counted as moving. Tried to hide from the fact that he already half-knew the answer, and just didn’t want it confirmed.

“How did you get over there, anyway?” Mansell’s voice had the timbre to it of someone trying far too hard to be off-hand, betraying the importance of the question.

There was no answer anywhere in Kent’s head. He reached back for one, and a rush of panic writhed in his stomach with the gleam of mirror-light. All of those snarling reflections. He wanted to dig the heels of his hands into his eye sockets until he saw stars, to bring himself back, back to the here and the now and Mansell’s waiting, but he had to keep _still_ , no matter that his thoughts turned on one another, snapping.

He barely even remembered fleeing, much less the direction that he had taken. It hadn’t mattered, nothing had mattered except that it had been _away_ , and Mansell wouldn’t understand that.

“I think… I think I ran,” he found himself saying, voice small and uncertain and barely sounding anything like him. The boards beneath his cheek scratched against his skin as he spoke, the scent of age and disturbed dust catching in his nose, a cough threatening in his throat.

“Right,” Mansell echoed, and there was something disbelieving in his tone, as if he’d only picked the word for something to say. “Best not try that again, I don’t think.”

_Don’t move_ , Kent repeated in his head, and the inevitable itch started in the small of his back, as if it had been a summoning incantation. _Don’t move_.

“It’s just,” Mansell said, and then his voice splintered into hesitation, returning muffled, as if he were biting at his lip. “I don’t want to worry you or anything –” 

_Don’t panic_ , Kent heard, because panicking meant thrashing and scrabbling and _falling_.

“– It’s just that the floor’s looking a little unstable, is all.”

“A little unstable?” Kent echoed, hating the tremor that twisted through his speech, hated it more as it began to tremble in his shoulders. He bit hard into his cheek, trying to stop it, tasted rust, but he could still feel it threatening, flickering around the periphery of his being.

“A little unstable,” Mansell agreed, the words rushing together into one breath, as if trying to squash away even the inkling of more information. “Just…” 

_Don’t move_ , Kent filled in, the mantra looping in his head like a stuck record, but that was more than he could cope with, when it felt like his breathing was far too much, his abdomen twisting with it, the involuntary twitching of his shoulders increasing in violence the more that he tried to keep them still, the edge of pins and needles sparking through his feet. The floor beneath groaned as if the woodworm had chewed it down to a single fibre, the violent rush of air through him a threat to break it.

Mansell said something else, with the cadence of a curse, but Kent couldn’t listen to anything beyond the sound of the floor below him rending itself to pieces, creaking along the edge of his teeth. He could feel it against his skull, and his throat constricted around it, his eyes closing tightly as he struggled to avoid the panic that was replacing the blood in his veins.

Even once it quieted, it only felt like the roiling of the sea, distant one moment, a far-off roar that was easily forgotten, though the threat of a forward surge and drowning never left.

“OK, Kent, I’m going to get you out of this,” Mansell said, his voice almost quieter than the shuddering of the boards. Kent heard conviction and clung to it, trying to force himself to believe it. Instead, his overactive mind dissected it, and found the stresses that indicated that his colleague was trying to convince himself more than he was Kent.

Then there was the speechlessness, as if Mansell hadn’t yet quite worked out exactly how he was going perform that miracle, and Kent felt his fingers contorting into claws, ready to rake at the useless planks in a desperate last bid for purchase, convinced that he could feel the void below him, his head twisting like an acrophobic’s.

“What we’re going to do is –” Mansell stopped short, as if he had suddenly forgotten how to speak, and when the words came back, they were more hesitation than noise. “I’ve worked out the least wor– the _best_ way for you to get over here, and I’ll tell you where to go. Listen to me, and you’ll be fine.”

He stopped again, as if expecting Kent’s agreement, but didn’t wait long enough for him to remember how to form speech.

“I need you to trust me. I promise you, mate, I’m not going to let you fall.”

Mansell’s assurance brought the situation into clear, accusatory focus, and the prospect of it seemed suddenly absurd to Kent, a reversal of the situation so abrupt that it was difficult not to let out a high-pitched bark of laughter. The words weren’t difficult to find any longer, spitting from the back of his throat like fat from a frying pan.

“Why the hell wouldn’t you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's been reading, you'll probably all be glad to know that the end is in sight! I'll probably have the next chapter up soon, though I can't put a specific date on it.


	18. Chapter 18

It was like a punch to the throat. All the relief that Chandler had had upon regaining the light, all their success, struck away, until there was nothing left in his head but staring. Staring, and the same hopelessness that he had felt after they had found McCormack, after Morgan, after _don’t put them all in the same van_.

Miles didn’t leave him to feel it alone for more than a heartbeat.

“Maybe there’ll be another one of those passage things,” his sergeant suggested, all pragmatism and confidence as he strode to the wall, his face resolute enough that Chandler knew he would search every room twice before he gave in. For a moment, he wanted to help, but the first knock sounded too much like the first track on a hated album for him to join in, put out a detestable single of his own.

He didn’t think that the answer to their second problem would be the same as their first, anyway. Thornton didn’t seem the sort of person to just hand them the master key so easily.

With nothing else to focus on, Chandler took a step closer to the trapdoor, and then another. Slowly, as if it were some trick of perspective which would vanish, blink away the moment that he got close enough to touch it.

It was still there by the time he reached up to give it an experimental shove, finding it as solid and impassable as the first one had been. He swallowed, pausing for the moment that it took for the roil of the nausea to ebb enough for him to keep studying the barrier, to remind himself that there had to be a way through, or there was no point in the exercise.

Chandler tried to concentrate on it, examine it as Llewellyn would a corpse, see more about it than the simple fact that it was separating him from his team; from the people who were the axis on which his world turned, without whom he would go into freefall. That it wasn’t the distance he usually chose, glass walls through which he could glance if he ever felt the need to, see that they were all still there, flickering points of light in the ever-dimming incident room.

It was made of a different wood from the rest of the floor, darker and heavier, almost as polished as the table in the dining room. Chandler rested his palm against it, wondering if that was how it had become so smooth, whether decades’ worth of team building victims had done the same as him. He slid his hand along, the surface a balm after the splintering walls of the cellar, until one of his fingers juddered against something cold. Frowning, he craned his neck to see it better, his eyes catching the faintest of bronze glints, like the glimmer of a campfire on the furthest of hills.

A keyhole. Almost unnoticeable, despite the scratches around the lock, dragged through the wood with a force which must have torn out nails. Chandler tried not to see them, not to measure the distance between the lines with that between his own fingers, and glanced around for Miles.

“There’s a lock here,” he announced, and Miles paused in his knocking to glance around, the sudden silence foreign to Chandler’s brain, forcing his thoughts to scatter. He took a moment to regain them, and he could see the impatience hardening his sergeant’s features. “We just need to find the key, and we’ll be able to get up onto the next floor.” 

“Bit of a long shot, isn’t it?” Miles pointed out, one hand hovering over the next section of wall, ready to fall again, to find another nothing. “If they’re trying to keep us here, I doubt the key would be on this floor.”

“A bit of a long shot?” Chandler echoed, raising one eyebrow, a laugh threatening to shake its way loose from his chest, shredded enough by the dark of _below_ that it would sound more akin to a sob. Swallowing it back was almost painful. “This from the man looking for a secret passage?”

Miles grunted his concession of the point, but turned back to his wall, rather than offer any more thoughts. The first rap, not hollow enough to indicate success, sounded almost like a condemnation of the idea of a key, and Chandler ignored it.

He made his way through to the utility room first, the trapdoor in the floor still slammed firmly into place, the transition between it and the surrounding boards almost seamless now. A tug on the ring, which seemed more likely to send him toppling than to reveal the cellar, told him that it was as locked as the one over the stairs, though there was no key in sight, and no safe place to put one. Anything left on these surfaces would end up stuck behind something, in a crevice too deep for hands to reach into, and the thick layer of dust on top of the washing machines was undisturbed.

With no sign of anything in the hall, Chandler headed through into the dining room, half hoping that Miles would suddenly find one of his secret passages as he was passing. The sergeant had been making good progress, his knocking more regular than it had been in the cellar, but he said nothing as Chandler went by, the silence stubborn. Both of them were too certain in their ideas to break it.

There were far too many places where a key could have been secreted. Chandler went to the dressers first, peering between the ornaments. A porcelain dog snarled at him, a muzzle which had once been carefully painted now scratched through until the creature’s countenance seemed riddled with scars. Behind it, a key-shaped gap in the dust taunted him, nothing there now. He moved on, trying to ignore the way that his movements became more abrupt with each empty space, the worry wringing evermore violently at his brain. 

After ten minutes of fruitless searching, more and more static filling his head with every blurring second that passed, Chandler sat down heavily at the table. He reached for his Tiger Balm, struggling to get his thoughts into order when he could barely comprehend what they contained.

Miles was probably right. There wouldn’t be a key, because that would be far too simple for Thornton’s tastes, not when the way out of the cellar had been a passage. But it wouldn’t be that again, either, because he doubted repetition was in the man’s nature, and that meant that they didn’t have a clue how to get to the next level, and if the others were stuck in similar situations–

He put his head in his hands, the heedless pressure of his fingertips prematurely wrinkling his forehead, his eyes sinking into folds of tired flesh.

When Chandler looked up again, his gaze caught instantly at one of the windows, on a box sitting on the sill, a dour silhouette in the grey light.

He was reaching for it seconds later, the space between him and it nothing to his mind when the hoping sped him, gave his shoes the wings of Hermes’ sandals. It was made of glass, with a frame of polished wood, cold to the touch, his nails paling to blue where his fingers grasped at it.

Written in marker along the top was _I believe you might be looking for this._ He stared for a moment at the handwriting, jagged lines which nearly split the pen one moment and elegant, swooping curves the next. It wasn’t Thornton’s – he had seen the man’s names and addresses signed in the books in his room, squashed loops and ks which looked more like dinosaurs than letters. And none of the analysis from any of his courses seemed to fit.

The key glimmered dully inside, sparking golden reflections in the glass walls, until it seemed that there could have been one for every door in the house, each a promise to save them all. Desperate to feel those shades of gilded comfort in his own head, Chandler’s fingers scrabbled at the sides of the box, searching for the catch to open it. The myriad mirrored keys spun with the movement, dancing a jig through his skull that set his hands trembling. It only worsened when he found nothing, no break in the smooth edge.

Of course, he told himself, forcing a swallow through a throat that felt sewn together from sawdust. Of course it wasn’t going to be quite so easy. He glanced around for something to break the glass with, and his eyes fixed themselves on the heavy candlestick in the centre of the table. His lips quirked oddly at the sight of it, the thought that it brought to mind. _DI Chandler, in the dining room, with the candlestick._

It was only once he had rushed over, his breath coming as quickly as if it had been two-hundred metres, rather than two, that he realised the catch. He would need to steady the box with one hand in order to break the glass. The shards would slice into his skin, may even become embedded there. Even if, miraculously, he managed to avoid injury at that stage, the key’s mounting looked stable enough that he wouldn’t be able to tip it out – he would need to reach in, and he would be slit open then.

_It’s just a few cuts_ , Chandler told himself, his free hand sneaking to raise his weapon, the metal cold against his fingers as he gripped it tight enough to feel the patterns embedding themselves into his palm. Just a few cuts against the rest of his team.

In one quick movement, before his mind could realise that there were more risks for him than that, Chandler brought the candlestick down as hard as he could, flinching back from the impact, the noise of it clashing against his head in discordant, devilish music. The pain burned through his hand, and he managed to open his eyes again in the moment that the wounds were still bloodless. He watched with a distracted fascination as the first few beads of red squeezed themselves free, leaving scarlet trails over his skin on their way to drip from his wrist.

The box had collapsed in on itself, he saw, once he was able to drag his eyes away from his injuries, convincing himself that they were only minor. Most of the glass had fallen to the table where it glinted, a scatter of false diamonds, though some still curved in broken, clawed edges from the frame. The key looked suddenly lesser now, the odd light that it had held when its prison had been intact gone, and Chandler regarded it, uncertain.

He reached in to pluck it from its setting anyway, his teeth itching with the glass scratching against his skin, and closed his fingers around it, turning to stride back towards the stairs, where the sound of Miles’ knocking gave heartbeat to the building. It faltered as Chandler stepped past him, and he could feel his sergeant’s eyes on the drips of blood that he left in his wake.

“I hope it’s worth it,” Miles muttered, but he followed him back to the trapdoor despite the scepticism that had grown roots through his tone, keeping whatever other comments he had to himself.

Chandler said nothing, shifting the key to the hand that wasn’t bleeding and doing his best to ignore the smears of red that it left on his palm. He raised it toward the keyhole, panic beginning to bloom in his head, spores of anxiety filling his skull in clouds as he tried to push it home. It stuttered around the edge for a moment before it went in.

He made to turn it, but something jarred it to a halt no matter which way he tried. Every time it stopped, it felt like the thoughts drained from his head, and his eyes landed, staring, on Miles, needing an explanation, an indication that he’d done something wrong, anything, that they could fix.

So long as the key wouldn’t turn, they weren’t going to be able to get to the others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is later than I intended it to be, needed a lot of fixing. Thanks to everyone for reading, thanks to everyone who's been leaving kudos - as I've probably said before (it's still true), you're all lovely. I'll try and have the next chapter up soon.


	19. Chapter 19

Once, Riley would have been relieved to hear Mansell’s door close behind her. It should have meant that she had time, that Buchan wasn’t so close on her heels that her life was measured in moments. Instead, the noise left an imprint in her head that felt like the shadow of a minor chord, jerking her head back around as if with wires to stare beseechingly at the barrier, waiting for the rest of the funeral dirge to trickle forth.

Something else caught her eye, and the shape of the notes fell from her mind as abruptly as if there had never existed an instrument which could have played them. It sat on Mansell’s bedside table, like a book that he read a chapter of before lying back to wait for sleep to swallow him, and it hypnotised.

She crossed to it slowly, Buchan half-forgotten behind a slack, mesmerised face. Reaching for it was the next line in a poem that dictated everybody’s story, and her finger curling, snakelike, around the trigger, was the pen to decide how it ended.

The weight of the gun was warm enough to burn away the fear that had crowded a thicket into her head, as if it were no more substantial than mist over water. Riley raised it, a smile dripping over her face, treacle-slow and sharp-edged.

Buchan would be bringing a knife to a gunfight, and she would be able to take control. Force him to put it down, to see sense, and when the boss and the skipper got there, they wouldn’t need to rescue her. And the gun wouldn’t even have to be loaded, though she could tell, somehow, that it was.

Serene, Riley moved a little closer to the door, listening for the sounds of the historian’s approach, for the inevitable rattle of fingers on the handle.

The stillness of waiting enveloped her, the first few minutes wandering calmly by, until the prickling started along her scalp. Her shoulders itched until It felt as if the wall at her back crawled beneath her weight, pressure building in her temples.

It wasn’t really control, the house confided, through the mutterings of the pipes in the walls. Not when all she was doing was standing there, waiting for Buchan to find her. After all, the sort of detective who waited for the criminal to come to them was the sort that never made an arrest.

She had opened the door a moment later, quickly enough that she felt the breeze of it against her eyes, and took a single, confident step out into the corridor, fingers white around the gun.

Nothing there, no one there. Just her own shadow, dogged and loyal at her feet.

It was seven stalking strides to the first of the unoccupied rooms, and Riley crossed the distance more easily than she had in months, through days when her movements had still faltered from the impact of Crispin Wingfield’s fall. The handle turned easily, and she shoved the door hard enough that it struck the wall on the other side. No one behind it, then.

And no one near it, it seemed; Buchan was gone, the room silent without the whispers of his angry breathing, even the pipes holding back their hisses.

A flash of movement darted across her vision like a fish, and she started, bringing the gun around to point through to the bathroom. The shower curtain was drawn across, she noticed, the splay of material prickling into her mind, certain that it hadn’t been that way before.

Her eyes fixed on the offending billowing, Riley made her slow way into the bathroom, as if she were afraid that moving too quickly would startle whatever had taken up residence behind.

A violent sweep of the gun showed nothing there, the movement just a ripple of air from a window which hadn’t been open. She leaned over to shut it, her hand freezing in the threat of the outside’s frigid temperatures.

With nowhere left to search, Riley turned and made her way back to the hall, the edges of her mind curling with every board that creaked under her tread. They felt loud enough for everyone in the house to know where she was, let alone Buchan, and yet, despite the straining of her ears, she had heard nothing to indicate the historian’s hiding place.

As she approached the next room along, the edge of a thrill sliced through her stomach with the realisation that after this door, there would only be a single one left. Sooner rather than later, something was going to happen, and she would be the person to force it to.

The idea dragged a smile across her face, and it was still there, a dull stretching of lips, when her hand pushed the door wide. She stepped inside, almost in a dream-state, and perhaps that was why her eyes caught too late the brink of the shadow that lurked to her left.

Riley tried to bring the gun around, too slow. Buchan had already struck, something cold coming down hard on her knuckles, freezing against skin and bone. Her fingers convulsed, her weapon dropping to the ground with a clatter that ignited panic in every cell of her body.

She grabbed at his wrist, twisting it away from her instinctively, her nails digging for the pressure point, but her mind froze for a moment too long at the sight of the gun.

Buchan’s pistol was identical to hers in every way, except that it was still in his grip, and Riley’s hand, suddenly slick, slipped away from even the possibility of making him drop it. She shoved upwards instead, trying to force the muzzle away, half understanding what it would do to her and half desperate, unreasoned terror that the dark of it would rip her soul away if she allowed it to glare at her for more than a fraction of a heartbeat.

There was a thunk, her mind taking a moment to recognise it as him kicking her weapon away, hardly remembering that she had had one; the sense of power that had hummed in her veins with it felt thousands of miles away. Her every frantic thought, teeming in her head like minnows, had focussed upon keeping the gun away.

Riley tried to lunge for the trigger, to pull it while the weapon pointed up, empty thunder into the ceiling until all that was left was clicking, but Buchan had already moved, his elbow jabbing hard into her gut. She yelped, her grip faltering enough for him to wrench free, the barrel striking hard enough against her cheek that she fell sideways with the impact.

She stared up at him, and his features were taut, twisting in a way that she could feel the mirror image of on her own face. He didn’t look as he had when holding the knife anymore. There was fear there, running under the skin like a flaw through a diamond, but the façade was resolute. He looked as he had in that zombie apocalypse game, all that time ago, when he had been gripping a spar of wood instead of a firearm.

Perhaps, if she had had the gun, she would have looked like that, too.

Riley’s eyes were drawn away from him by the black hole of the gun’s muzzle, as it pulled the light and everything else into it, until the world shrank to that single point of dark, waiting for the bullet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Easter holiday starts next week, so I'm not sure I'll be able to update for the duration; the next chapter might be a while coming. Not that this one wasn't. Anyway, thanks for reading! ^.^


	20. Chapter 20

For a moment, Kent’s words made no sense. To Mansell, they were just noises, strung together like clashing carnival lights, and the inevitable response formed on his lips. Scratched from his throat as if he had spent the whole day shouting.

“What?” It sounded exactly as it had for the entirety of his time at secondary school, because he’d always been too busy trying to come up with a way to ask his next girlfriend out to listen to anything as trivial as maths, and he winced. That question belonged to the Finlay Mansell that he had wanted to leave behind, the one that Kent had still believed in, at a cost to both of them.

“Why wouldn’t you let me fall?” Kent’s face twisted around the repetition. Perhaps the emotion dripping from it was too scathing, too savage, to leave his mouth without contorting his whole expression. “I let you.”

That was the only provocation Mansell’s traitorous mind needed; the moment flashed to the forefront of his consciousness. The flat hopelessness of the street below, the ache in his throat that he could feel in his whole being, the bite of the cold in his hands as he lined up his things along the edge of his sorrows.

He shook it away and gritted his teeth against its return. It was gone, over, and it wasn’t coming back because he was doing _right_.

“Riley handled it.” That wasn’t enough. He knew before he had finished saying it. Five syllables would never have been enough, even if they had been the right ones. But he didn’t know the way to the right ones, and he was blundering again, blundering as he always had, and he had no way of stopping.

“She shouldn’t have had to.” Kent’s voice had the same tone as the creaking of the boards beneath him, so low that Mansell barely heard it.

There was a laundry list of failures that he could respond to that with, even if their consequences weren’t quite so near-fatal. He picked the most comparable, though he felt like someone on a game show, struggling to find the right reasons before time ran out, the ticking of a countdown clock replaced by the whining of wood.

“And I didn’t have to give Eva what I thought was Spanish Fly. Googling it would have taken me, what, five seconds?” But that wasn’t what he was looking for, either. They could trade failures all night, and it wouldn’t get them anywhere fast. Fast was what mattered, because he could hear the sighing of the floor beneath Kent, as ready to give in as the other DC was. The noise ignited the edge of his thoughts, panic beating in his chest. “I understand why you did what you did. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I forgive you, that’s not the sort of thing you forgive, but we settled it. And I’m going to do everything right by Erica, mate, I swear.” _I’d never want to hurt either of you._

“I know,” Kent said, and Mansell grimaced at the hollowness in it. This wasn’t about him and Erica, not really, it was just a facet of a much greater problem that he had hardly realised existed, not until Kent had started to tell him. “You should hate me.”

“I think you’re doing more than enough of that for the both of us.” Mansell shook his head, struggling to understand what he couldn’t quite see, frustration beginning to colour the edges of his vision. “Look, if you want to be punched in the face again, I’ll do it. Just get over here, yeah?”

Silence, and there had to be something else to try, had to be, but he wasn’t a telepath, and there wasn’t time for him to guess. “Kent, talk to me. If you’re going to stay over there until the floor gives way and make me watch, you at least owe me an explanation. Why?”

Kent let out a great, shuddering breath, which Mansell convinced himself that he could feel through his feet, as if the despair of it was enough of a weight on the boards. “I left you there, Mansell. What sort of person does that? What sort of person lets a dead criminal’s loving mother near the woman he tried to kill, or lies to their twin about something like that?” The next part was hushed, and he had to strain to hear it. “There’s something wrong with me.”

“Riley was handling it,” Mansell repeated grimly, as if that would get him a different result this time around. “If she hadn’t been there, you would’ve come over, you wouldn’t have left me like that alone.” Or, perhaps, he would have. It had recently grown harder and harder to tell what Kent was thinking, but that wasn’t what he chose to believe. “You were just trying to keep Erica from getting hurt. And as for Morgan Lamb, you couldn’t have known what was going to happen. You don’t blame the boss for it, do you? He acted about as unprofessionally as you did. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“There has to be. I can see it,” Kent admitted, and his voice was barely above a whisper now, edged with something halfway between laughter and sobbing. “I look in the mirror, and I can see it. I don’t know how much difference there is between me and the people that we go after.”

Mansell wasn’t about to pretend that he understood the first bit, but then, they’d all been losing their minds in their own specific ways. The phone calls, the plaster on Riley’s hand. Perhaps this was just Kent’s own particular brand of madness. But the second part, that he could answer. “The difference between them and you is, Kent, that you’re terrified of it. Just look at where you are now. You’re scared of being like them, like our murderers? You think they ever did what you’re doing now? Listen, suicide or murder - they’re not your only options. I won’t let you turn.” But, how much faith did Kent have in him? Not enough to believe that he had changed his ways for Erica, and he couldn’t take the risk. “The boss won’t let it happen.”

Kent almost seemed to flinch from that, and Mansell tensed, worried that that had been too much, too fast. That his friend might start to think that he would say anything to get him moving, whether it was true or not. “Why would he care?”

It took Mansell a moment to determine whether or not this was a defensive reaction, or a genuine question, and picked the latter only because he hoped it might help.

“You know, I was there when you asked him out for a drink,” he pointed out, face stretching at the memory. Better times, when they had all believed themselves safe. Perhaps if he stared fixedly out of the window, into the grey, he could pretend that they were still there, under lights that had stopped flickering. “Right behind you. You slipped up, weren’t fooling anyone. Least of all him. They didn’t make him DI for nothing. Or, at least, they haven’t kept him as DI for nothing.”

He paused, giving Kent time to respond, but his friend stayed quiet, his face unreadable, despite the groaning of the floor, loud enough now that Mansell couldn’t hear his own breathing.

“And he said yes. Hell, he said more than yes.” And now might not be the time for relationship advice, but, well, he was never going to get a free pass to give it again. “Ignore what I said before, I reckon you’re in with more than a chance there.”

Still nothing. Perhaps he wasn’t going to get anywhere with this, either, but he wasn’t sure what else he could continue with. He wasn’t an idiot; he didn’t presume that in the time that he had, he would be able to fix everything which was wrong. But he didn’t need to, he told himself. Just enough to get Kent over onto firmer flooring. The rest would come in time, if Whitechapel stopped turning its shoulders to their attempts to help it.

“But the point is, you’re not some sort of rot which needs to be cut out. You’re one of us, and we save people. We saved that kid. Or, the boss did, but if you hadn’t found that body, he might not have been able to. We save people.” _So let me save you_ , he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. “And you’re too afraid of being a bad person to be a bad person. Otherwise, you wouldn’t still be over there.” He hoped that Kent saw sense in that, where he wasn’t certain there was any.

There was still no response, and a sudden heat washed over Mansell’s back, with the realisation that Kent might not have been listening at all.

“Look, Kent, even if for no other reason than that Erica will kill me if I let you fall,” he said, and he wasn’t sure if his voice snapped with fear or anger. “Move it. You love her, don’t you? Don’t want her to be hurt? Then don’t hurt her.”

It was quiet again, save the creaking of the boards as Kent breathed, too quiet, too long, but Mansell couldn’t speak into it anymore. He had dredged everything from every corner of his brain, and said all he could to convince Kent, but in the end, he supposed, it wasn’t up to him.

The floor let out another groan, this one sharper, more dangerous, and Mansell’s arm shot out to steady himself against the door. His fingers grazed the handle, and he tried turning it, hoping against hope that it would open. That he would be able to go and find the boss, whose words would hold more sway than his would.

Nothing. Mansell squared his jaw, ready to try kicking it down, only for his ears to catch the faintest of scraping sounds from behind him.

Kent had moved, one hand stretched out towards him, and it seemed that the world crushed inwards, pressure building in his skull, because it was down to him now. If his path wasn’t good enough, he realised, sweat slickening the hand that still clutched at the door, it would all be over. There would be crashing, and then there would be _down_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it was a while. I'm hoping to have the next chapter up soon, and by my reckoning there's only about five left. Thanks for reading! ^.^


	21. Chapter 21

Miles thought he could hear the footsteps again. Above them, faint, but still audible. As if she were walking up and down the corridor, guarding whatever hell she had created. Coming closer, inexorable, eyes cutting, unblinking. Step after step after step, tumbling through his mind and forcing the rest of his thoughts to freefall.

Or perhaps it was just the sound of his own heart. Something he didn’t really hear, a pulse so strong that his brain was tricked into believing in a sound that wasn’t there. The house, toying with his mind just as she had.

He looked to Chandler, but found the DI already staring at him, eyes pebble-wide and fingers white around the key, turning it this way and that in faltering, frantic motions.

“You’re trying too hard,” Miles snapped, shouldering his boss out of the way, only for the key to fall in an arc of bronze, vanishing into the shadows that crawled across the stairs. He swore, and Chandler crouched to scrabble for it, his hands clumsy with desperation. Miles tried to help him, but something in his back cracked with the attempted movement.

Instead, he scanned each step, looking for the tell-tale glint of metal. His mind prickled with disquiet at the idea, either drifting from his own subconscious or from the ghost of Louise Iver, that even if he was staring directly at the key, he wouldn’t be able to see it without his glasses.

Miles searched, and Chandler searched, his hands scuffing against the stairs, and the quiet of it, the inaction, muffled around Miles’ head like thick blankets. His senses suffocated, until he wasn’t properly seeing what he pointed his eyes at, a gulf widening between the world and the inside of his head.

His spine straightened with the shock of the noise, as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over him. It came from above, but everything was above, every _one_ was above. A thump. _Someone falling to the ground_ , his mind muttered, but then rebelled against the idea. It could just as easily have been something thrown, with force, something heavy, dropped.

It left an acrid aftertaste in his throat, all the same.

“You find that key yet?” Miles demanded, voice perilously close to snapping. As if he were talking to a fresh-faced new constable, rather than to his superior officer. But Chandler didn’t seem to notice, all his attention focussed on his task.

“Not yet,” he replied, his uninjured hand patting from one end of a step to the other. Meaning that he hadn’t found it in the most likely places, so a more methodical search was required.

A more time-consuming search.

“We need to hurry,” Miles informed him, shifting to check directly below the keyhole, his complaining joints be damned. It wasn’t anything that either of them didn’t already know, but sometimes it helped to be reminded of a time limit.

There was no worse place for the key to have fallen. The stairs were riddled with knotholes that were exactly the right size for it to drop through and never be seen again, and Miles was loathe to sweep his hand across the surface and risk knocking it into one of them. Even if it meant that he stared until his eyes burned, refusing to blink in case he missed the flash of metal.

“I think I’ve got it!” Chandler declared, the sound of nails scrabbling across wood breaking Miles from his search. The boss was scratching at one of the corners, frustration clear on his face as he struggled to grip the key.

He had it a moment layer, and this time it turned easily in the lock. Miles swallowed whatever comment he had been about to make without even knowing what it was, and instead pushed at the trapdoor to help Chandler raise it.

The first floor was still. The air felt as if it hadn’t moved in centuries, and it had an old scent to it. Castle dungeons, he thought, like ones he had visited with his kids, their ghoulish excitement at seeing torture chambers stark in contrast to the nausea turning in his stomach, because he had seen what things like that did. Where cruelty was concerned, people never really left anything behind. But those places had been filled with tourists, with children clutching wooden swords. This was like the bowels of the castle after everyone else had gone home and the lights had been turned off.

There was no one there, Miles knew, but he still pushed into every room to check, while Chandler hurried to the next trapdoor. He joined the boss moments later, his fingers reaching for his neck, to tug at an ache in his spine. They had wasted so much time on the floor below, searching for the key not once but twice, and to make it through this one so easily was unnerving. It felt like being played, like being counters in a board game, like everything that had happened below was to allow time for another force to get its pieces into position. The house itself, Thornton, Louise Iver, he supposed it made no difference. They were run like rats all the same.

They carried on up, and Miles almost ushered Chandler toward the upper level, but something in the pattern of shadows along the wall stopped him. He squinted, searching for the difference, like in his kids’ puzzle books.

One of the doors was open. Chandler had already seen it, and Miles rushed after him, only to barely avoid crashing into the other man’s expensively clad back when he stopped abruptly. Miles glared irritably at the boss’ shoulders for a moment, then stepped out from behind him.

Buchan and Riley were just inside the room, Riley on her knees, and Buchan with a gun levelled at her head. Miles stared for a moment, taking the scene in more slowly than he would have liked, before his eyes skipped away. Half hoping that the situation would stop existing if he didn’t look at it, half searching for context. For something to explain why, but all he could see was the other gun, too far away for either of them to use.

Chandler was similarly dumbfounded, but neither Riley nor Buchan seemed to have noticed their arrival. Their attention was fixed on the gun, unblinking. They could have been statues, and Miles wished that they were, some sort of elaborate waxwork which breathed and sweated and stared.

“Ed,” Chandler began, but he didn’t seem to know where to go after that. And it wasn’t as if the historian had heard him. He didn’t even react to the noise, didn’t twitch in surprise at their presence.

Miles winced at the memory of the last time that he had been in a situation involving both his boss and a gun, and stepped in front of Chandler. His stomach roiled with the far-off sound of SCO19’s firing, the flapping of the DI’s coat as he had stepped towards what might have been his funeral, but he swallowed the nausea, forced it from his voice.

“Oi, you two! What’s going on here?”

For a moment, neither of them answered, the quiet pulling the twisting in Miles’ gut up into his throat again. Then, something bobbed in Buchan’s neck, and he spoke, but his eyes didn’t move from his weapon.

“I have to defend myself,” he said, slowly, every word considered and certain. Miles looked to Riley, waiting for a more detailed explanation, but she still seemed completely unaware that he was even there. She might have been the waxwork, propped up and posed.

“And you’ve done that,” Miles informed Buchan, glancing over his shoulder at Chandler. The boss was watching the exchange, the ever-familiar frown accentuated by the fall of the shadows over his features.

There wasn’t time for watching. Because if the place had turned Riley and Buchan on one another, then God only knew what it had done to Kent and Mansell. And perhaps the boss would be better at reaching Buchan, better at negotiating than someone who had been belittling the historian since _says he knows everything about the murder _. But Chandler had definitively proven that he could separate their remaining DCs, where Miles had failed. He couldn’t take the risk that he would do so again.__

“Get up to the next floor, sir,” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low enough that Buchan and Riley wouldn’t hear, even if they had been listening. “There’ll be problems up there, too.”

Chandler’s eyes flicked between Miles and Buchan, uncertain, lingering on the historian and his weapon. Miles could see the indecision, and he cursed it, because if there had ever been a time for the boss to listen to him, this was it.

“Is that real?” Chandler muttered, as if Miles hadn’t spoken. Perhaps he hadn’t heard. People reacted to guns in strange ways; some wouldn’t look at them, some wouldn’t look away. And that didn’t even consider who was holding it on whom.

“Looks like it,” Miles informed him, though all the fakes worth bothering with did. “But you should get on.” He looked away from Chandler, trying to signal an end to the discussion, and he thought he heard the other man take a step toward the trapdoor. He waited for another, but nothing came.

“I don’t know,” Chandler said, and the words set clouds of frustration blooming into Miles’ skull like the spores of a fungus. “Maybe I should–”

“I’ve got this,” Miles snapped at him, and Buchan wavered a little at the violence of it, raising the gun a fraction of an inch higher. He carried on more quietly, without turning. “Trust me. Go on.”

His words were punctuated by a crunching from above, the noise twisted through with the shrieking of tortured timbers.

He didn’t have to tell the boss to leave again. Miles didn’t move to watch him go, but he listened out the footfalls as they ran, the thud of the trapdoor as Chandler slammed it open.

On his own, he turned his full attention back to Buchan, Meg, Buchan’s gun, and to trying to come up with the words which would stop him from losing two more of his team.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter should be up soon, as I'm hoping to have the whole fic uploaded before Camp NaNo starts in July. In the meantime, thanks for reading! ^.^


	22. Chapter 22

The world had shrunk, and Kent’s little corner of it had been magnified beyond all proportion. Time was measured now in the slow stretching of millimetres, every one of them agonising. He could feel what Mansell had said about the floor in his hands, where he had tried to pull himself forwards. The planks were rough and pitted, and his skin burned where it had dragged against them.

There was no other option, though, Mansell had told him. He had to _stay down, spread your weight so there’s less strain on the wood_ , but the groaning of the boards was getting louder anyway. More pained. Enough that sometimes he could hardly hear what his partner was saying.

With each creak, the panic that had spread wings in his throat strained that little bit wider, became harder and harder to breathe past. And Mansell sounded so very close, a distance he could have covered in a second, less, under ordinary circumstances.

But Mansell kept telling him to take it slowly, his directions peppered with the insistence that Kent _keep calm_. His speech, as firmly ponderous as possible, did nothing to hide the frantic hitches in his breathing. Mansell would smooth them out, pretend that they hadn’t happened, but they always came back, the way a spinning top might wobble over an irregularity in a surface, then right itself again, until the next pass.

“A little to the left,” Mansell prompted, then paused as Kent did his best to comply. The grain needled his fingers with splinters, but it was his partner’s sudden, violent curse which made him flinch. “Sorry, I meant my left. Um, your right.”

Back the other way, a little further. _Slow_ , Kent reminded himself, only to be suddenly assailed by the ludicrous image of himself, racing a host of snails across the floor. Trails stretched across the boards like cling film, Mansell commentating, obnoxiously bright numbers painted onto swirling, yellow and tawny shells.

The threat of the smile was shocked from his face by an ominous groan from the planks. He froze, eyes wide enough that he could feel cold air against them, stinging where he hadn’t been sleeping.

“You’re all right,” Mansell offered, but it didn’t seem like it. Something crunched below one of his feet when he tried to move it, the floor bending slightly under his weight. He tensed, jaw clenching hard enough that it felt like his teeth were being driven down into the bone. “Keep coming.”

_He sounds closer now_ , Kent informed himself, but no matter how authoritative he tried to make his thoughts, he couldn’t force himself to believe that he was any more than fifteen centimetres from where he had started. And if Mansell sounded anything, it was strained. Under his façade, the other DC’s voice had the cadence of someone playing out the moves in a chess game towards what was inevitable and inescapable defeat.

“Kent,” Mansell said, and Kent reached out a slow hand, leaning pressure down onto it as if he were trying not to disturb a nest of scorpions.

He could feel sawdust on his clothes, seeping through to his skin like a disease. His mouth tasted of it, too, but he couldn’t close it. Couldn’t get enough air in through his nose. Another few centimetres, and he had to pause again, his limbs aching as if his bones were turning to liquid.

“Not far now,” Mansell declared, but he couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet from where he had woken up, at most. Even as unsure as Kent was of the size of the whole room, he knew there was still a long way to go. “Right a little.”

Mansell's _least worst_ route was as circuitous as the mazes in the magazines he had read when he was little. He adjusted, his movements on the microscale, and the floor sighed like a roomful of children on their third maths lesson of the day.

“A little more. Don’t go forward again until I say.”

Kent did as he was told, but as he moved sideways, his fingers brushed the boards ahead of him, and one caught in the edge of a hole. There was nothing beneath it but void, the threat of the fall, raw against scraped skin. Kent’s breath tore in his throat, and he heard Mansell take a half-aborted step forwards.

“Kent? Kent, you need to keep moving, you’re fine,” he promised, but Kent couldn’t find _moving_ in his head. There was nothing there but the cold frantic need to run, without any way of contorting his legs to make that a possibility. “Kent, you need to move.”

He couldn’t. He could feel the edge against his hand, and it was too close, far too close, but he couldn’t not move, either, his whole body twisting with the harshness of his breathing. It grated in his head, a counterpoint to the leap of the pulse that threatened to burst the skin at his throat.

“It’s just another few inches,” Mansell told him, _lying_ , Kent knew, and it was still too far, even if it had been the truth. He couldn’t have managed nanometres. “Keep going, I’ll be able to reach you soon.”

He tried. He tried, but as he shifted, he could feel the floor warping beneath him. His gut lurched, and his slow movement became a desperate twitch.

It was all Mansell had wanted.

“Good,” he announced, and Kent clung to the word, steadied himself with it. “You’re doing well, you need to go forward again now.”

Kent dragged in as deep a breath as he dared, and held it for a moment, before he tried to move again. The pain in his arms came back, and he managed to consider it, on some surreal level, finding it similar to the aches that he would have got after PE in school. Normal aches. That was all this was, he decided that he would believe. PE. He’d got through years of that, and he’d get through this.

Kent barely heard the crack, like a lightning strike, as the floor gave way beneath him, but he felt the sudden nothingness, his lower half abruptly unsupported and _falling_ , the dizzying shift as time took up speed again. He slid backwards, grabbing at the useless planks in front of him, and, somewhere distant, Mansell was shouting, the wood snarling as he rushed forwards.

Another board broke away, and Kent’s body swung down, legs kicking as if he were trying to swim. Wood grated against his chin, his nails tearing, and he yelped, made to scrabble upwards, but he was dangling now, with nothing to push off on. Splinters dug into his right wrist as he struggled to keep his grip on the edge, and the limb jerked, slipping even as he clawed for purchase.

Mansell’s hand caught his left forearm and held it, anchoring, while his free fingers snatched at Kent’s clothes, trying and failing to pull him up. He could feel his partner’s panicked breathing against his face, the noise of it nothing, lost to the rushing in his head and the raking of the pain.

Kent felt Mansell hauling at him, though all it managed was that he didn’t fall any further. But he could hear the floor again, threatening to let both of them drop unless they gave up. Mansell wouldn’t, and there was no point in asking him to.

There was nothing to do but hang there, his mind desperate and twisting, as if there was something that it could do, some thought that it might come up with. Nothing. One way or another, he was going to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this time, it seems I've actually managed soon. The next chapter should be up... soon. It's entirely dependent on how much time it takes me to edit it. But in the meantime, thanks for reading, and thanks to those who've been leaving kudos (you're very kind)!


	23. Chapter 23

“Why don’t you put that down, Ed?”

Buchan’s fingers ached as he tightened them around the stock, his skin stretching, suddenly too small for his hands. Miles’ question had set new anxieties rattling through his skull, as if, rather than just speak to him, he had tried to wrest Buchan’s weapon away.

Because, he told himself, that was exactly what Miles had done. Just a more subtle form of it, _negotiation_ , as though Buchan were some sort of criminal. And maybe that was exactly how the sergeant thought of him; it was how he had looked at him throughout the Ripper Investigation, and he wasn’t sure if it had ever stopped. Part of him wanted to sneak a glance sideways, see if that was how the man was regarding him now, but the rest of him refused. He couldn’t risk it, couldn’t be drawn into _negotiation_ with Miles, who had hated him since day one. And even if he hadn’t, the sergeant would be more likely to support his colleague than he was Buchan.

Any promises that spilled from his mouth would be rotten at the heart. Trickery. Eventually he would turn, as Riley had, to sharp blades and sharper words, the instant that Buchan let him have the upper hand.

“The way I see it,” Miles went on, as if, though he had expected a response, he didn’t particularly require it. Resolute, like the house against the ceaseless drizzle. “You have two options. First, you give me the gun. It’s been a weird few days, and we probably never mention it again. Option two has a little more to it. You shoot Riley. That’s murder. Or at the very least assault with a firearm. Grievous bodily harm. But, most likely, murder. Which means that, immediately after shooting Riley, you would have to shoot me, because otherwise, I’m going to arrest you. And then, I imagine, having enough bullets, you would need to shoot Chandler, Mansell and Kent, too. Then you’d be alone, here, waiting for Thornton to come back. Alone for the rest of your life, I’d say, having to explain all this to your mother. Is that what you want?”

_If you made me, I’d shoot any of you_ , Buchan thought, though the gun was shaking in his hand, the doubts beginning to cloud his mind like bursts of paint in water. If there was no choice, if all of them threatened him the way that Riley had, maybe. But they weren’t. Not yet.

“The fact is, if you pull that trigger, you won’t be able to stop pulling it,” Miles informed him, and the words made sense, too much sense. He tightened his grip reflexively, both on the weapon and on the certainty that he had had before the sergeant had arrived on his floor. “And, then, you’ll lose your job, your archive, everything.”

But he still might, if he took the gun off Meg. Did Miles think that he was threatening to shoot her merely because _the mood had come upon him_? The sergeant didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, hadn’t seen the same monsters that Buchan had. Hadn’t lost consciousness with Riley as a friend, and woken up to her as an enemy. Hadn’t seen her, stalking through the shadows, weapon in hand. Maybe he might have conceded it an illusion, some kind of twisted self-defence, if he hadn’t seen her face. The smile lurking there, ugly and utterly genuine, as if she were showing her true colours for the first time.

“Put it down, Buchan,” Miles ordered, his voice turning firmer, as though Buchan were a junior officer who had stepped out of line. “There’s nothing else that you can do.”

There was, though. There was Option Three, where he shot Riley, stopped her from hurting anyone, because maybe, Buchan’s frantic mind informed him, maybe, Miles’ concern was as genuine as it appeared, maybe he and Joe and the others really were trying to help, help him, and maybe she would kill them, too, if he let her.

He was the only one that knew. He was the one who had to take action. And, in that instant, he would have, would have pulled the trigger. He felt it happen; his bones jarring with the recoil, the sudden splay of dark red across the door, rivulets beading against the knotholes as if the wood was leaking sap. Above it all, the noise, a crack that might have been the foundations splitting in two, loud enough that Buchan felt it in his eye sockets.

“I want you to get out of this alive,” Miles said, and he was jolted back to a place where the gun hadn’t gone off, his eyes sweeping to stare at the sergeant. It wasn’t a phrase particularly brimming with sentiment, but it felt as if a drop of blood had, despite everything, been wrung from a stone.

Buchan stared, and perhaps Riley was staring, too, because she didn’t try to disarm him. Miles was looking him in the eye, trying to persuade him simply with the force of his belligerent glare, threatening violence should Buchan ever dare to repeat any of it.

“I won’t go so far as to say you’ve saved our lives tonight,” Miles went on, his mouth twisting, forming shapes that it wasn’t used to. “I don’t know what sort of situation Mansell and Kent are in. The boss and I, we got trapped in the cellar. But there was a passage, like you said there could be before. We might still have been down there. You’re a part of this team, and when the boss fetches Kent and Mansell and we all go downstairs, where we will stay until we can leave, I’d like it if you were with us. But first, you need to give me the gun.”

“You don’t understand,” Buchan said, and the speech had an odd taste, as if it comprised of words that he had repeated until they had no meaning. “She will kill me. She had a knife, and then she had a gun, and if I put mine down, she’ll kill me.”

Miles nodded, though it seemed like it was half to himself, taking in the information, before he turned to Riley, the shadows under his eyes deepening as he turned his head.

“What’s this all about, then, Riley?”

Riley shifted slightly, so she could meet the sergeant’s eyes, and the gun twitched in Buchan’s hands, shock juddering his limbs, as if he were flinching back from a snake.

“He was the one with the knife,” she hissed, and she might have been a completely different creature from before, all of the scorn gone from her voice, leaving only the same steely-eyed decision to survive that he would have seen in the mirror. “He was going to kill me, is going to kill me, look at him!”

“If he wants to shoot you,” Miles asked, and the utter calm in his voice felt like anaesthetic, settling the prickling along the edges of Buchan’s nerves. “Then why hasn’t he done it yet? There was plenty of time before the boss and I got here.”

Riley didn’t answer, and Buchan wondered if, had it happened the other way around, had it been him on his knees and her with the gun, he would still be alive. The way that she had carried her gun, he decided, he would have been lying on the ground, staining the carpet.

“Why don’t you tell me about these knives then,” Miles said, settling backwards a little, as if there was no danger, and he were content to mediate for as long as it took. “Seems like that’s where it started.”

“She had one, when I woke up, and I ran before she could stab me,” Buchan declared, with all the authority that he could force into his voice. It didn’t feel like all that much, when he couldn’t stop his fingers from trembling. “I found the gun in her room.”

“He’s lying,” Riley snapped, and if Buchan had had to pick someone to believe, he would have chosen her. She sounded utterly certain, where he couldn’t have said that his words hadn’t shaken, faltered, turned traitor. “There were no guns in my room. He had a knife. If anyone was going to be stabbed, it was me.”

Buchan wanted to protest, declare his innocence as loudly as he could, as if volume would make up for nervousness, but Miles spoke first.

“Where did you find your gun, Riley?”

“Mansell’s room.” She answered him with the sort of prompt efficiency that would serve her well in her sergeant’s mind, Buchan thought, his knuckles blanching around his only advantage.

“And do you honestly believe that Mansell brought a gun with him?” Miles demanded, one eyebrow twisting incredulously. “To me, it sounds about as unlikely as the two of you wanting to kill one another. I’m not trying to say that you’re lying, Riley, I’m just saying that there are inconsistencies in your stories. Now, you said you woke up?”

“We were trying to get the trapdoor open,” Riley said, and Buchan hoped that he could hear something considering in her voice, something accepting that Miles was making sense, just as he could feel himself doing. “And there was this noise. It must have knocked us both out. I woke up, and Buchan had a knife.”

“And each of you thinks that the other would be more interested in killing you than in discovering the source of the noise?” Miles seemed, to Buchan, dangerously close to developing the Australian question inflection. “It’s this place. It’s wrong. I know that Buchan would never try to kill Riley, and that Riley would never try to kill Buchan, but I don’t think either of you are lying. The only explanation is that someone else tried to kill you. So, Buchan, where did you wake up?”

“The room opposite Riley’s.” Buchan barely noticed that he had lowered the gun a fraction, staring at Miles with eyes as wise as if the man could have produced the sun from his pocket.

“Riley?”

“The one opposite Mansell’s.”

“Well then,” Miles said, his tone as satisfied as if he had just solved everything, instead of spawning a whole new slew of questions that Buchan wasn’t sure he wanted answers to. “There we are. Riley, whoever tried to kill you, it wasn’t Buchan. Buchan, whoever tried to kill you, it wasn’t Riley. With the guns, you both just wanted to defend yourselves. Put your gun down, Buchan, and there won’t be anything to fight any longer.”

The sergeant leant down and picked up Riley’s gun, his lip curling a little as he fiddled with it. The bullets clattered out onto the ground at his feet, and Buchan flinched at the noise, his weapon almost falling from his grip.

“No one needs to get shot,” Miles said, holding his free hand out toward Buchan, palm up.

Buchan swallowed, fighting the impulse to close his eyes, and took a cautious half-step toward Miles. Riley didn’t move, watching him with a narrowed, unreadable gaze. He felt a pull in his chest, wrapping around his ribs, almost instantly, trying to drag him back to where he had been, insisting that he still needed to be able to defend himself, and willed it away. Turned the gun away from Riley, unable to understand why he hadn’t already dropped it from hands so slick with sweat.

He reached the rest of the way across the distance, moving more quickly now, trying to shut out the muttering thoughts that told him, calling from the void, that he could shoot both of them, if the mood took him. The metal touched Miles’ palm, and Buchan flinched away from it, wiping his hand across his cardigan. Then he ducked his head, blinking up at the sergeant, waiting for reprisals.

Miles smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not quite so soon as I had hoped, but on the bright side, there's only two chapters left (surely not even I can procrastinate them too long)! Thanks to everyone who's been reading, leaving kudos and/or comments, you're lovely. ^.^


	24. Chapter 24

Pareidolia. That was all it was. The mind, making patterns from the random; seeing a rabbit on the moon, Christ in toast, or laughing faces in the doors as he closed them. Chandler had seen the first one in the panelling closest to the stairs. The mouth, teeth stretched broken-jaw apart, unrecognisable as simply a warping in wood.

After that, they were everywhere. Gaping from the skirting board, howling from the doorjambs. He had half-convinced himself that he could hear them, the slightest of noises, barely fluttering the silence that had fallen with the trapdoor behind him. A sound just on the edge of hearing, something to which the brain did not think it important to listen. Akin to his own breathing.

Perhaps it was just an auditory trick, his mind easily lied to when it was so desperate for a noise to indicate which door Kent and Mansell were behind. The crashing that Chandler had heard from downstairs had vanished as soon as he had ascended, so abruptly that it was hard to believe it had ever happened at all.

A part of him which, despite everything, was still trying to rationalise, reasoned that perhaps, following his own strange motives, Thornton had soundproofed the walls. The rest refuted that – he had heard the sounds of people walking past his room on their first night, and what use would there be in only soundproofing one floor? Besides, _rational_ had gone out the window the moment that Jacqui Brierley had set pen to paper.

Chandler slammed another door shut, and cursed when the key stuck in the lock. It seemed that eons trickled past in the moments that it took to yank it free, his thoughts moving quickly enough to count every last second of them off. In that time, his entire team could have gone down to bones, and he was too late, too late to save anyone.

He barely realised that he had reached the last room until he had it open, and the scene beyond took him far too long to absorb. It looked as if it were some sort of sadistic mock-up, all inexpensive props and worse CGI, the hole in the floor not quite real. Mansell, clutching out over the void, an illusion.

There was no time between the final click of understanding in his brain, and the creak of the boards under him as he collapsed to his stomach, leaning out over the drop. He caught a fistful of Kent’s jacket, his other hand closing around the wrist that Mansell didn’t already have a grip on.

Kent’s head jerked around, a flinch, violent enough that it could have convinced Chandler he was electrified, nearly shaking him from their hold. Chandler tightened his fingers reflexively, until it seemed that he was grasping the bones beneath the flesh, the rest of it just a blur of X-ray grey.

“It’s just the boss,” Mansell said, his voice so close to a sigh of relief that it was barely audible. “We can get you up now.”

For a moment, Chandler thought that perhaps he should suggest some sort of countdown, but Mansell had already doubled his efforts, the strain showing on his face, in the teeth he had bared. Chandler pulled with him, and Kent began to rise, slowly, as if the drop were not an absence, but some sort of creature that was reluctant to relinquish its prey.

The planks at the edge splintered as Kent tried to put his weight against them, rotten and cracking, so riddled with woodworm that they must have been more air than floor. Below Chandler, the boards let out a whine that curled around his teeth, and he set the idea aside, before his skull could thicken with a vague sense of vertigo.

Aches began to boil in Chandler’s shoulders, scattering fire down towards his elbows, as if he had been holding such a weight, more than it, ever since the end of their last disastrous team building exercise. But then Kent was up and lying on the firmer boards between Mansell and Chandler, wide-eyed and breathing as if he had been dragged from drowning, rather than falling.

Mansell scrambled up, shying away from the drop, though he collected himself a moment later, and changed course towards the door, his face splitting into a marvelling grin when it opened. Chandler stayed where he was, his fingers still wrapped around Kent’s wrist. They seemed to have stuck there. He could feel the rush of his DC’s blood, his heart thrumming so quickly that it almost felt as if there were insects swarming beneath the skin, and his thoughts recoiled from the idea of losing the beat.

Kent swallowed, trying to calm himself, as Chandler helped him into a sitting position. It didn’t appear to have worked; there was still a tremor in his free hand, and a faint rasping noise when he breathed, as if his throat were dry. Chandler’s own airway seemed to narrow in sympathy, and he took a moment before speaking.

“Can you stand?” he asked, one hand settling in the centre of Kent’s back in an awkward attempt at support, while he tried to convince the other that the DC’s pulse wouldn’t stop if he let go of it. It wouldn’t listen. “It’s just that we need to get back downstairs.” Assuming that Miles’ negotiation skills, which weren’t quite what the mention of the man’s name brought to mind, had given them something left to go downstairs to.

Kent nodded, then shook his head as if he were clearing flies. Perhaps he thought that the gesture would rid himself of the fear of the fall, but it could never have been so easy; struggling upwards, he stumbled as if he were a fawn taking its first steps. Chandler steadied him, steering him away from the void when the direction of his wobbling seemed to waver back toward it.

“Oh, he can’t see at the moment,” Mansell announced from the door, still holding it open, as if he thought that it would close the moment he released it. Maybe it had, before. But even if it did, the reassuring weight of the key was still in Chandler’s pocket.

“What?” Chandler glanced from Mansell to Kent and back again, but Mansell just shrugged, and while Kent didn’t quite mirror the gesture, he didn’t seem as if he were about to offer any other explanation. “Right,” he said, his mind stalling for a second as he adjusted. “Well. This way.”

The hallway almost felt a sacred place. Tranquil. Chandler’s heart rate slowed the moment that he shut the door on the drop, and Kent’s breathing grew suddenly more even. One of Mansell’s heels kicked along the carpet, the genuine smile that had graced his face a moment ago slipping back into a contented half-smirk.

A thumping from the stairs heralded the raising of the trapdoor, and the appearance of Miles’ head in the gap, like an elderly and heavily armed whack-a-mole. He deposited both guns onto the landing, and then wiped his hands on his shirt, with a slight quirk to his upper lip that Chandler recognised as distaste.

“I thought it might be a good idea to leave these up here,” the sergeant said, and though he didn’t ask verbally after their welfare, Chandler saw him scrutinise each of them in turn. He seemed to relax, fractionally, but it was so minute a shift that sighting the movement of an hour hand was easier to be certain of. His gaze lingered on Mansell, narrowing slightly, though when he spoke, it was the voice he used for witnesses, not suspects. “You didn’t bring either of them, did you?”

“No, skip,” Mansell replied, calmly, unable to muster any more surprise with which to confront the idea of him bringing firearms on a team building session to Wales.

Miles grunted, ducking out of sight, and a slow, stupid smile spread across Chandler’s face. Attempts to force the expression away came to nothing, though he had better luck quashing the small burst of thankfulness that Kent couldn’t see it, as he entrusted his DC to Mansell’s guidance, and rummaged in his pocket for the key.

By the time that he reached the dining room, having locked every single trapdoor behind him, sealing away their chances of being separated again along with the guns, the others were all already there. Buchan, sitting as far away from Riley as possible, a paperback that he had spirited from somewhere open in his hands. He was staring blankly at the pages, and didn’t turn them. Riley and Mansell were deep in conversation, gossiping like old women at a fête, though their smiles were half-forced. Miles clattered about in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards with more force than necessary, and Chandler guessed that he was looking for something to eat.

He sat down on the other side of the table to Buchan, next to Kent. The DC looked up, though his hands kept picking at each other, trying to remove the splinters, and a sudden panic flushed through Chandler’s head. Kent had no way of knowing who he was, not unless he said something, and the words had bubbled up and out of his mouth before he could stop to consider them.

“Are you all right?” he asked, and then winced. There were far better ways of phrasing that question, ones without quite such an obvious _no_ answer to someone who suddenly had one less sense than they were used to.

Kent, however, seemed to mull over it for a moment, his hands stilling.

“I’m mostly hoping it’ll go the same way it came,” he said, after a long beat of quiet. “I mean, I just woke up in that room, and I was like this. I didn’t hit my head or anything, or at least I don’t think so, but why shouldn’t it go like it came? It _has_ to go.”

“It probably will,” Chandler offered, though he couldn’t hear any confidence in his voice. Kent gave him a half-smile anyway, but he didn’t return it. The prospect of Kent’s vision not returning simply hadn’t occurred to him – he had assumed that it was just a trick of the house, like the trapdoors shutting – and now far too many of their possible futures made his mind try to curl inside his skull at the thought of them.

He just let the quiet back, let it rise, until, if he had chosen to, he could have listened in on Riley and Mansell. They hadn’t moved, but Buchan had; the historian had given up on his book, and was wandering hesitantly through to the kitchen, as if to help Miles. Chandler watched his meandering steps, the idea that he should go too beginning to skitter through his thoughts.

“Sir?”

Kent’s quiet voice dragged Chandler’s attention back to him. The DC’s eyes were down again, fingers back to scratching at splinters.

“I don’t know if I should – I don’t know,” Kent continued. “But, you saved my life, sir, you and Mansell, and I was thinking.” He stopped, swallowed, and Chandler let him collect his thoughts, though his brain itched with more than mild curiosity, edging toward impatience.

“You’ve been thinking of leaving, haven’t you?” Kent asked abruptly, and then froze. Perhaps he was awaiting some form of reprisal, or was simply afraid of the answer. Whatever his reasons, he didn’t appear to be quite aware that he had stopped breathing.

Chandler winced. He had been considering it. More than that. Gone as far as finding the forms, writing his letter. In his situation, he told himself, anyone would have. Every killer he tried to bring in ended up dead at his feet. No reprisals. No justice. No nothing.

“Don’t,” Kent said, softly, though there couldn’t have been greater conviction in his voice if he had shouted, his eyes lifting to look vaguely in the direction of Chandler’s. “Please. It’s just, something Mansell said to me, sort of. You’re not the man who caught the Ripper – no one is – but you still did what Abberline couldn’t, what no one else could do. You stopped him, sir.”

Chandler hesitated, the options for his replying crowding into his head. He could snap, tell his DC that he wasn’t being professional, and he wasn’t, but that day, who had been? He could say something else, something reassuring, something kind. He could say he hadn’t been considering leaving, just postpone hurting Kent until the future made a liar out of him.

In the end, he didn’t say anything. All the words in his vocabulary, from poetry to operating procedure, and none of them would have tasted right. Instead, he stood, and, almost unconsciously, reached out to put a hand on Kent’s shoulder. Left it there for far too long.

_The man who stopped the Ripper._ He rather liked the sound of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one more to go! I’m hoping to get to editing it soon, but I doubt it’ll be up next week as I am unlikely to have wi-fi. Maybe it’s just what I need to become more productive fic-wise! Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed! ^.^


	25. Chapter 25

Chandler had been slipping between worlds for hours. It was as if the night had splintered, pieces of it falling through his head and reflecting different scenes into his eyes. In what he had chosen to believe was reality, he watched the dawn come, slowly, like the first few drips of the thaw, filling the window with dour light. The others ( _in the dark in the dark, bones to dust beneath his feet and the sun never rose_ ) were different, and made, he hoped, of dreaming.

He did his best to reassure himself. Looked to his team, so he knew that Riley ( _hole-headed, hands still reaching, clawlike, toward her gun_ ) was lying at one end of the carpet, Mansell ( _teetering on the edge, when one push would be all it took but the world never stopped shoving_ ) at the other. Kent ( _crumpled over the stairs, his bones with new joints in them_ ) had settled in a corner, Miles ( _just a voice and a creak of joints in the dark, still searching for the way out even though he found nothing over and over again_ ) was snoring in an armchair. Both of them, Chandler was sure, would have aching backs when they woke up, and go hunting for painkillers, only to discover that Buchan ( _fingers dripping with Riley’s blood as if he had tried to return it to her skull_ ), uncomfortable on a row of dining chairs, had already taken them.

If Chandler listened hard enough, he could hear them breathing, so quietly that they barely fluttered the silence. Tŷ Gors was swallowed in the hush that only the time between late and early could cast; the pipes were suddenly mute, and the rain had ceased its rattling against the slates. This, he told himself, was the reason for his drifting. His sleeping, when he had decided to stay ( _he walked away from the station for the last time, and tried not to feel his team staring after him_ ) and wait and watch for morning.

By the time that Miles shifted, groaning, it was almost ten, and the room, despite the mist that still constricted around the house, had filled with a clean white light. Chandler blinked more firmly awake at Miles’ movement, watching as his sergeant’s eyes squinted their way open.

“Morning, boss?” Miles managed, the words straining as he stretched out his arms. He winced, presumably some twinge or other making itself known.

Chandler offered him a grimace in return. Pins and needles were threatening in his own limbs, buzzing on the periphery of his consciousness. He suspected that that would set the cuts on his hand throbbing again, but if that was all that he had to deal with today, then he supposed that he could count it as a rest.

“Everyone still here?” Miles asked, apparently unwilling to turn his head and see for himself. Chandler nodded, wondering for a moment if whatever ache his sergeant had was bad enough that he would go back to sleep, but instead the man stood and went to poke Mansell awake.

Chandler rose, too, wondering if that was what he should be doing, but before he could make a decision as to whom, if anyone, he was comfortable with waking, the door to the dining room swept open.

He almost didn’t recognise the man standing there, as if it had been years, rather than days, and all he could do was stare. The man stared back, his head tilted to the side with some sort of cold curiosity, before his gaze skipped away, landing on each member of the team in turn. _Counting_ , Chandler realised. Seeing how many of them were left.

Thornton blinked, and Chandler read surprise into the gesture, a slow anger beginning to bubble up from his stomach, like a pan of water just beginning to simmer.

“Sorry about that,” Thornton said, as if he had just nipped down to the shops and left them alone for five minutes. For a moment, Chandler could have believed it; Thornton wore exactly the same clothes as he had before, his collar crooked in the same way, a crease in his sleeve where he had hooked his umbrella over it. “It was unavoidable.”

For an instant, everything was still, the three of them that were awake all just staring, and then, Mansell reacted. He took one stride, and then another, gaining momentum until he was almost running. His fists locked around Thornton’s lapels, and he swung the man sideways into a wall, the crack of the impact shaking the door in its frame.

“You bastard,” Mansell spat, the volume of it abruptly waking Buchan, who glared blearily from Thornton to Mansell and back again. “You utter bastard.”

Thornton considered Mansell, his expression suddenly veering toward blankness, as if the man holding him were simply a rude customer, expressing mild displeasure at the service.

“Was something not to your liking, Detective Constable Mansell?” he asked.

Mansell punched him, hard enough to snap his other cheek into the wall, but the man almost seemed not to notice, turning back as if the blow had never happened, not even the slightest of flinches in his face. Chandler had seen what Mansell’s fists could do, but he found himself doubting that there would even be a bruise.

He glanced at Miles, waiting for him to call Mansell off, but from his sergeant’s curled lip, he would’ve been perfectly happy to be punching Thornton himself, and Chandler wasn’t sure that he wanted to intervene, either.

“Was something _not to my liking_?” Mansell echoed, his teeth digging at the words. “We could have died!”

“You didn’t, though, did you?” Thornton straightened suddenly, shoving Mansell away with a strength that didn’t seem to suit his body. Chandler frowned, taking half a step forward, but Mansell didn’t push back.

“What was this for, then?” the DC demanded instead, though his hands flexed in and out of fists at his sides, a warning. “What was the point of nearly getting us all killed?”

Thornton blinked again. “Team building,” he said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Which, I am given to understand, is exactly what you came here for.”

Miles placed a restraining hand on Mansell’s arm, and Chandler wondered if he would’ve done the same. Perhaps he would have just let Mansell hit Thornton, and keep hitting him until they had been given an explanation, an apology, anything, even just their car keys.

“And,” Thornton went on, apparently oblivious to the prospect of any threat. “It looks to me, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, as if it worked.”

“Doesn’t work for everyone, though, does it?” Miles demanded, his hand slipping away from Mansell, as if giving him permission to attack again. But Mansell stayed where he was, glaring. “There’s a body in your cellar, or had you not noticed?”

“In the cellar, Detective Sergeant Miles?” Thornton offered them all a half-smile, as if he had found some sort of strange humour in the words. “I don’t think so. Nothing in there but boxes. I’ll show you, if you like. Put your mind at rest.” He stepped back, gesturing toward the door, and Miles stormed out, Mansell on his heels.

Chandler hesitated, glancing back at the others. Buchan was on his feet, at least, but Kent and Riley were only just sitting up, faces still dull to the world around them. The idea of leaving them vulnerable sparked the dreaming back into his head for a moment, and then he could do nothing but wait for them to become more alert. He didn’t need to see the cellar, after all. Either it would be as it had been before, or it wouldn’t.

Kent turned his head, and his eyes focussed on Chandler. A moment passed, then a genuine smile lit his face, and Chandler felt an answering one tugging at his own features. Kent’s sight was back, he concluded, but there was a shout from the next room before he could ask to confirm it. Miles’ voice, harsh and spiked.

“I don’t bloody believe this!”

Chandler met him in the hallway, though he already knew what they had found. He could hear Miles’ teeth grinding from five paces away, over the sound of Mansell tramping back into the dining room.

“Just damn boxes,” the sergeant growled. “Boxes. Floor’s covered with them. It’s like none of it ever happened.”

Maybe, Chandler found himself thinking, the doubt hissing like gas from the hob, it hadn’t. Maybe they had all just dreamed it, a strange shade of collective delusion. After all, more than half of it was completely impossible, and even if the rules had stretched after Jacqui Brierley’s note, they hadn’t quite broken. _Surely_ they couldn’t have broken.

“The floor,” he said, anyway. “Where Kent fell through. It should still be broken.”

He knew what they were going to find the moment that they started up the stairs, Thornton trailing bemusedly behind them, and found that the trapdoors were no longer visible. Gone. Perhaps, they had never been there at all.

It was as if the rent in the floor had scabbed over, healed up, overnight. Become factory-setting new again. Thornton strode out into the centre of the room, and the boards didn’t even squeak beneath his shoes.

“That’s impossible,” Miles snapped, as if he could dispel the sudden stability simply by naming it as such.

“I assure you,” Thornton said, though Chandler convinced himself that he could see laughter lurking somewhere behind the man’s expression. “If there were any issues with the structural integrity of Tŷ Gors, no sessions would be held here.”

Miles snorted, structural integrity apparently not particularly high up on his list of concerns about the building, but Thornton spoke on over it.

“Now,” he said. “I think it would be for the best if we went back downstairs. Perhaps we could sort out some breakfast.”

The idea of the smell of food set Chandler’s gut shifting uncomfortably, but he allowed himself to be shepherded back down to the dining room anyway. Did his best not to see the doubt beginning to creep into Miles’ expression, lest it thrive in his own head. But once they reached the others, he couldn’t help glancing at them, trying to see if they shared the fears that prowled around his head like wolves just beyond a campfire circle, of loss of control so great that he could imagine a nightmare to be real in daylight.

Kent didn’t seem to notice Chandler’s gaze, his face set with concentration as he picked at one of his wrists. Pulling at the splinters, a single dark red droplet of blood showing against the pallor of his skin.

Blood. Chandler flexed his own hand, and a tight pain spidered along the cuts that the glass had left in his skin. Still there. A promise that they hadn’t just been dreaming, no matter how much Thornton tried to convince them that they had.

Chandler looked around for Miles, opening his mouth to point it out, but Thornton had already seen him noticing his injury, and looked straight into his eyes as he spoke.

“And the way I see it,” he said, and the mirth lurking behind his eyes curled a little closer to the surface. “Theoretically, if such things happened in this house as, oh, I don’t know, doors closing and locking themselves, a person’s optic nerve temporarily not doing its job, even doppelgangers, well, they’re not the sort of things that anyone’s going to believe, are they? And I’d say it’s best not to open that particular can of worms at all – if, _theoretically_ , if anyone ever tried to talk about it – well, no one wants a delusional copper on the force, do they?”

No. No one did. Thornton was laughing at them, even if his expression didn’t move. He knew there was nothing that they could do about what had happened, and he wanted to make sure that they were aware of it, too.

“But anyway, I shouldn’t keep you,” Thornton went on, his gaze wandering from Chandler, safe in the knowledge that his message had been understood. “I assume that none of you want to stay here any longer, and the house seems to have done its work. Pauline has brought your bags down, she is such a wonder, never leaves, so kind of her to take care of you while I was gone, but if any of you would like a drink or something to eat before you go –”

“No,” Miles interrupted, taking a step toward the door, as if Thornton were some fickle god who would snatch away their leaving as casually as he had offered it. “No, we’d rather leave right now.”

“Fine, fine,” Thornton said, digging one languid hand into his pocket. He dropped their car keys onto the table with a pointed clatter of metal, a reminder that he was the one to decide whether they came or went. “I found these on the drive, I believe they’re yours. You really should be more careful. Don’t want to leave something like that behind. Speaking of which, Pauline has left your phones in the box by the door, be sure to pick them up on your way out.”

None of them paused to wish Thornton goodbye, just strode out into the hallway, to find that their bags had been lined up along the wall, everything packed into them in neat, pristine folds. Chandler picked his up gingerly, wary of Tŷ Gors’ particular brand of hospitality, and carried it out to the car in silence.

Chandler paused by the sign, ignoring the drizzle that caught in his hair like tiny beads of glass. Something of the last few days’ weather had dislodged some of the moss that had clutched at it, revealing the first letter of the second word. But it had clearly been neglected anyway, the G looking more like a C.

He shook his head, and handed his bag to Miles as the sergeant tried to load them all into the back in a way that would still leave space for Buchan, waving off the others’ attempts at helping.

As he climbed into the passenger seat, Chandler noticed that Thornton had come out as if to wave them off, the rain sluicing off his features. But he didn’t raise a hand, and none of them watched him as they left.

They just drove away into the fog, back towards Whitechapel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is all (for now) folks. And I'm now wondering what on earth I'm going to work on without this (the logical answer being, I suppose, one of the eight or so other fics I have in the works). The last chapter's been a long time coming, so thank you so much for your patience! Thank you for reading, and special thanks to those who've left kudos or comments, they really do mean a lot. ^.^
> 
> If you have questions or comments that you don't want to leave here, or just want to say hi, you can find me at this [Tumblr](http://yszarin.tumblr.com/). But, thanks again, and goodbye!


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